tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47643549315175181282018-03-05T08:08:22.518-08:00Causal LoopAnton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-82053673555592060462015-05-26T13:30:00.003-07:002015-05-26T13:31:05.208-07:00Catch me if you can?Last week, news that the data behind a groundbreaking field experiment purporting to show long-lasting persuasion effects in individuals' attitudes towards gay marriage <a href="http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/05/really-important-psych-study-used-faked-data.html">had very likely been faked </a>spread across the political science community and the internet at large. These <a href="http://stanford.edu/~dbroock/broockman_kalla_aronow_lg_irregularities.pdf">revelations</a> have prompted quite a bit of reflection among scholars about the importance of unwritten norms of trust in scientific research and how these sorts of frauds can be detected without bringing the research process to a grinding halt.<br /><br />I think Jonathan Ladd <a href="http://www.mischiefsoffaction.com/2015/05/discovery-of-fraudulent-political.html">makes</a> an important point that we should not necessarily basing research norms and policy on detecting ex-ante the sorts of extremely bad faith fabrications like LaCour (2014). If individuals are willing to so brazenly lie about and obfuscate their research, then it is likely they will be able to circumvent any such barriers. &nbsp;What shocked me the most about the LaCour fabrication was exactly how "bad faith" it was in its scope. Initially I had thought the manipulation was done to a previously collected experimental dataset - tweaking the means of the treated units in order to obtain the desired effect when one was not found upon first glance. Reading the Broockman, Kalla and Aronow's note outlining the irregularities in the study showed that the manipulations were far more extreme - a la <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html?pagewanted=all">Stapel</a>, the observations were just made up.<br /><br />Not only is this sort of cheating hard to catch, it's difficult to envision a way in which the scientific community could make it more deterrable by increasing the costs of discovery. Don Green noted in his recent interview with NYMag post-revelation:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">But my puzzlement now is, if he fabricated the data, surely he must have known that when people tried to replicate his study, they would fail to do so and the truth would come out. And so why not reason backward and say, let’s do the the study properly?</blockquote>The punishment being heaped upon Michael LaCour post-retraction has been so swift and severe, and it is hard to believe that the size of this punishment was unanticipated. It's hard to see the decision to fabricate as a pure risk-reward trade-off - one <i>Science </i>publication, no matter how prestigious, isn't worth a lifetime of ostracism for data fabrication. Rather, as Stapel's <a href="http://nick.brown.free.fr/stapel/FakingScience-20141214.pdf">reflections</a> suggest, there is something intrinsically "thrilling" about the process of faking data itself.<br /><br />So if cheating is hard to both detect and deter ex-ante, what is to be done? Ladd is right to emphasize post-publication replication and review. As we've seen in the LaCour case, it's not a question of <i>if</i>&nbsp;fraud is detected, it's <i>when</i>. However, the <i>when</i>&nbsp;can be as long as decades, particularly if the manipulation is small, the costs to the scientific community in terms of "false knowledge" can be sizeable.<br /><br />But there's still room for some pre-publication review strategies. If we're interested in increasing the chances that a cheater will &nbsp;be detected, these strategies should aim to detect small violations and thereby push cheaters into more extreme fabrications. The more lies told, the more likely one will be detected and the entire scheme will fall apart. Note that in the LaCour case, much of the argument made by Broockman and Kalla questioning LaCour's data was made possible because a difficult-to-find dataset happened to be posted by in an unrelated scholar's replication data. This one "happy" accident was what led scholars to tear down the whole facade of the study (including whether LaCour was truthful about received grants - something which almost no scholar would think to question absent serious suspicions).<br /><br />One thought that came to mind to deter more subtle manipulations, particularly in experiments, is to create a way of verifying whether a dataset has been altered during the analysis phase. How do I know that the dataset released by researchers in the replication dataset is the same as the dataset collected at the end of an experiment? The gap between study completion and publication is many years in length. While researchers could allay concerns by posting replication data prior to publication, it's hard to imagine any scholar being willing to post their data pre-analysis and open themselves up to being "scooped."<br /><br />What researchers <i>could</i>&nbsp;very easily do is post online a <b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checksum">checksum</a></b>&nbsp;of their dataset immediately after the dataset has been collected. They would then conduct their data cleaning and analysis as usual and subsequently post their replication data after publication. Any scholar would be able to get the checksum of the posted data file and compare it to the checksum uploaded prior to analysis to confirm that the original data file has not been tampered during analysis. All modifications (data cleaning, etc...) to the file would be made transparently available in the analysis code. Because hashing algorithms are designed such that small modifications of the original file yield completely different hashes and that the chances of a "hash collision" (two different files yielding the same checksum) are extremely low, it would be very difficult for a potential cheater to make manipulations while preserving the original hash.<br /><br />I could imagine such a procedure being made a component of study pre-registration as it is a very low burden on a researcher (one <a href="http://albertech.blogspot.com/2011/08/generate-sha1-hash-from-command-line-in.html">command line</a> operation) and the registering organization would serve as a trusted third party in preserving the checksum. This certainly won't prevent data manipulation, but it would decrease the amount of time available to cheaters to manipulate data and possibly help increase trust in existing experimental datasets.<br /><br />Thoughts?Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-73729080068616669722014-05-16T10:06:00.000-07:002014-05-16T13:28:35.040-07:00How Bad are Duplication Problems in GDELT Events Data? Very!<i>Edit: <a href="http://badhessian.org/2014/05/it-is-time-to-get-rid-of-the-e-in-gdelt/">Neal Caren</a> beat me to it! He comes to the same conclusion as well - GDELT only appears de-duplicates when records are exactly the same...which misses a LOT.</i><br /><br />Caerus Associates' Dr. <a href="http://caerusassociates.com/team/dr-erin-simpson/">Erin Simpson</a> recently took <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/">FiveThirtyEight</a> to task over <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/nigeria-kidnapping/">an article </a>about the recent kidnapping of 276 school girls in Nigeria. The problem: An appallingly poor and incredibly misleading use of the GDELT event dataset to analyze kidnapping "trends" in Nigeria. The full conversation as it unfolded on Twitter can be found preserved<a href="https://storify.com/AthertonKD/if-a-data-point-has-no-context-does-it-have-any-me">&nbsp;here</a>.<br /><br />This tweet in particular hit on an extremely important point<br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">So if <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23GDELT&amp;src=hash">#GDELT</a> says there were 649 kidnappings in Nigeria in 4 months, WHAT IT'S REALLY SAYING is there were 649 news stories abt kidnappings.<br />— EM Simpson (@charlie_simpson) <a href="https://twitter.com/charlie_simpson/statuses/466308105416884225">May 13, 2014</a></blockquote>The disconnect that the original FiveThirtyEight article failed to take into account is that GDELT, and machine-coded events datasets in general, are not counts of events; they're counts of news reports. Assuming a one-to-one mapping between the two is extremely problematic. Increases in overall media volume or duplicate articles will inevitably give an inflated estimate of the underlying true event count.<br /><br />Even more troublesome is that there's really no good fix for the duplication problem that has been developed. Normalizing by overall media volume doesn't do anything because we still don't know how many individual news reports = one event. When FiveThirtyEight writes "the database records 151 kidnappings on [April 15] and 215 the next," we don't know whether those kidnapping reports are all primarily talking about the single kidnapping in Borno State that garnered so much media attention, or 366 distinct kidnapping incidents (of course, it's the former).<br /><br />How problematic is duplication? I decided to take a look at the data on Nigerian kidnappings myself to figure out just what percentage of these GDELT reports are all discussing the same exact event. Here's what I found:<br /><br />First, multiple GDELT entries are often sourced from the same URL. It is very likely that these are duplicates since news reports, particularly wire articles, tend to focus on single events. I removed all entries with duplicate URLs and was left with only 98 kidnapping-related articles on April 15th and 123 on April 16th.<br /><br />Second, for a story as prominent as the kidnapping in Chibok, it is very likely that multiple news sources will report on the same event. Detecting this type of duplication is a major challenge and an open area of research in the event data field. One way of going about this is to look at the URLs for a hint as to the content of the article - news website URLs often contain the entire headline. Presuming that any article about Nigerian girls on April 15th and 16th that gets coded as a kidnapping is likely talking about the same incident, I searched for all URLs in the kidnapping dataset that contained "girl" 61 of the unique URLs on April 15th and 56 of the addresses on April 16th matched the query.<br /><br />So that left 37 potential kidnapping events on April 15th unrelated to the Chibok kidnapping. How many of them actually were?<br /><br />One way of answering this question would be to train a classifier on the set of articles (and in fact, I think this is one way forward for larger-scale de-duplication tasks). However, 37 is not that many articles, so reading them would suffice for this post. All but two articles were either about the Chibok kidnapping or unrelated to Nigeria. These two articles both referenced the <a href="http://dailypost.ng/2014/04/15/kogi-speakers-two-children-kidnapped/">same</a> <a href="http://www.tribune.com.ng/news/top-stories/item/3420-kogi-speaker-s-children-kidnapped">event:</a> a kidnapping in Kogi State.<br /><br />151 GDELT reports of kidnappings in Nigeria on April 15th - 2 actual kidnapping events.<br /><br />This is just one example of a general problem with GDELT - it's inability to do more than extremely basic de-duplication. Now this would be fine if it was selling itself as a tool for roughly monitoring what the news media is writing about, but <a href="http://gdeltproject.org/">GDELT</a> wants to be an<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"initiative to construct a catalog of human societal-scale behavior and beliefs across all countries of the world, connecting every person, organization, location, count, theme, news source, and event across the planet into a single massive network that captures what's happening around the world, what its context is and who's involved, and how the world is feeling about it, every single day."</blockquote>This simply isn't going to happen until we can reliably use media reports to extract distinct international events.<br /><br />A good de-duplication algorithm is essential for using machine coded events data for more than just monitoring media attention. Training classifiers to detect similar phrasing and word usage in the texts coded by TABARI seems like a promising means of removing duplicates, particularly because a sizable amount of work has been done on this problem in computer science and computational linguistics. However, given that so many of the texts from which GDELT is coded are unavailable for public review due to licensing restrictions, this approach is unlikely to be feasible in the short-term. This makes GDELT in its current form a rather limited dataset (except perhaps for more recent time periods where references to the sources are included). More generally, access to the source texts is a <i>must</i>&nbsp;for any effective de-duplication method - there's just too much information lost going from the text to the event code.<br /><br />One last comment:<br /><br />FiveThirtyEight decided to double down on GDELT and posted another article trying to map the <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/mapping-kidnappings-in-nigeria/">geographic distribution</a> of kidnapping reports in Nigeria. This still obviously suffers from many of the problems I mentioned above - these reports are all mostly talking about the same single event - but there's an additional issue introduced by using geocodes. The problem is that the geocoding algorithm works by extracting references to geographic locations and often many locations are mentioned in a single article. An article on the kidnapping may simply say that it occurred in Nigeria while others specify the sub-unit (Borno State). Moreover, if the article mentions a statement by the government in Abuja (or even has a dateline where the reporter happens to be stationed in the capital), the event derived from that article can easily get coded to "Abuja, Abuja Federal Capital Territory, Nigeria." This is likely why the FCT is bright red on FiveThirtyEight's map - it's the near-default location for ALL events in Nigeria (particularly when the federal government is involved).<br /><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-36901668034684883402014-03-03T18:40:00.001-08:002014-03-03T21:25:52.701-08:00Why a Nuclear Ukraine is an Empty CounterfactualIn light of Russia's military invasion of Crimea, an action that is in complete violation of its security assurances to Ukraine under the Budapest <a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ukraine._Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances">memorandum</a>, a number of <a href="http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/03/03/ukraines-nuclear-mistake/">commentators </a>have unearthed John Mearsheimer's 1993&nbsp;<a href="http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0020.pdf">article</a> in Foreign Affairs arguing that Ukraine would have been better off keeping a nuclear deterrent after the fall of the Soviet Union in order to check Russian expansion.<br /><br />As Walter Russell Mead succinctly <a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2014/03/03/putin-invades-crimea-obama-hardest-hit/">put it</a><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">If President Obama does this, however, and Ukraine ends up losing chunks of territory to Russia, it is pretty much the end of a rational case for non-proliferation in many countries around the world. If Ukraine still had its nukes, it would probably still have Crimea. It gave up its nukes, got worthless paper guarantees, and also got an invasion from a more powerful and nuclear neighbor.</blockquote>Indeed, this directly echoes Mearsheimer's argument for why Ukraine should have kept its arsenal<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">A nuclear Ukraine makes sense for two reasons. First, it is imperative to maintain peace between Russia and Ukraine. That means ensuring that the Russians, who have a history of bad relations with Ukraine, do not move to reconquer it. Ukraine cannot defend itself against a nuclear-armed Russia with conventional weapons, and no state, including the United States, is going to extend to it a meaningful security guarantee. Ukrainian nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent to Russian aggression. If the U.S. aim is to enhance stability in Europe, the case against a nuclear-armed Ukraine is unpersuasive.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Second, it is unlikely that Ukraine will transfer its remaining nuclear weapons to Russia, the state it fears most. The United States and its European allies can complain bitterly about this decision, but they are not in a position to force Ukraine to go nonnuclear. Moreover, pursuing a confrontation with Ukraine over the nuclear issue raises the risks of war by making the Russians more daring, the Ukrainians more fearful, and the Americans less able to defuse a crisis between them.&nbsp;</blockquote>But in retrospect, Mearsheimer's second point was clearly wrong. This is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum">precisely</a> what Ukraine did in 1994 in exchange for a weakly enforceable negative security assurance from Russia, U.S. and U.K.. The puzzle then is why Ukraine failed to listen to Mearsheimer's sage advice and did the unthinkable - transfer its nuclear weapons to Russia.<br /><br />In order to ask what would have happened had Ukraine opted to retain its arsenal, it is important to think through the <i>entire counterfactual.</i>&nbsp;The problem with the "if only Ukraine had nukes" line of argument it assumes that Russia would have tolerated a nuclear weapons state on its border in the first place. If we were to hold the world in 2014 constant and by magic turn Ukraine into a stable nuclear power, then perhaps Russia would have been deterred from occupying Crimea. But this is not the counterfactual we're interested in.<br /><br />What would have happened had Ukraine decided not to return its nuclear weapons arsenal to Russia in the 1990s? Rather than allow a nuclear Ukraine on its doorstep, it is much more likely that Russia would have chosen to preempt Ukraine and secure its arsenal by force. We would have seen something very similar to the current situation in Crimea, but on a much grander scale. The bargain struck by Ukraine and Russia in 1994 was a way of avoiding such an outcome.<br /><br />The logic behind this conclusion follows from a variation on Robert Powell's famous bargaining model of war analyzed in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/In-Shadow-Power-Robert-Powell/dp/0691004579">In the Shadow of Power</a>.</i><br /><i><br /></i>To summarize, consider a scenario between two states with varying levels of power (ability to win in a war) bargaining over the division of some good. So long as the distribution of power between states is constant and war is costly, a mutually beneficial bargain should always be reached that reflects the underlying distribution of power. If one state is dissatisfied with the distribution of the good, then the satisfied state still finds it beneficial to make a concession such that the dissatisfied state is indifferent between peace and war. Assuming that striking a bargain is cheaper than fighting a war (a reasonable assumption), states will make a deal instead of going to war. This is the conventional ``<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War%27s_inefficiency_puzzle">inefficiency puzzle</a>" of war - why does war occur if states incur costs in fighting and can reach a Pareto-optimal bargain that reflects the post-war outcome <i>without having to fight?</i><br /><br />One potential source of war that Powell identifies is a <i>commitment problem</i>&nbsp;that arises when the distribution of power between states shifts rapidly over time. Suppose that "now," state <b>A</b> is much stronger than state <b>B</b>, but in the "future," state <b>B</b>'s power will increase relative to <b>A</b>. <b>A</b> knows that in the future, in order to avoid war with <b>B</b>,&nbsp;it will have to concede much more than it does now (since future&nbsp;<b>B </b>is stronger and in equilibrium, the distribution of goods reflects the distribution of power). If the size of the power shift is sufficiently large, <b>A</b>&nbsp;may be better off choosing to fight <b>B</b>&nbsp;when it is weaker and risk claiming the good through war, preventing the shift in power that would force it into a weaker bargaining position in the future. The cause of this war is the <i>commitment problem</i>&nbsp;facing <b>B</b>. <b>B</b>&nbsp;would certainly be better off preventing <b>A</b>&nbsp;from going to war in the "now," since in its weak state, it will likely lose. If it could credibly constrain itself from using its future bargaining leverage against <b>A</b>, then both <b>B </b>and <b>A</b>&nbsp;would be better off (avoiding war). However, in the absence of some third party mechanism, any promises to not exploit its future bargaining leverage made by <b>B</b>&nbsp;"now," are irrelevant once it gains power in the "future." <b>A </b>and <b>B </b>face a situation akin to a prisoner's dilemma. They&nbsp;are jointly better off when <b>A </b>does not go to war and <b>B </b>does not exploit its bargaining leverage, but if <b>A </b>does not go to war, <b>B </b>is best off "defecting" and using its newly acquired bargaining power to extract more concessions from <b>A</b>. Knowing that <b>B </b>will do this, <b>A</b>'s best response is to fight and prevent <b>B </b>from rising.<br /><br />So how does this apply to Russia and Ukraine? In the post-Soviet period, Ukraine was rising relative to Russia. It had gone from a constituent part of the Russian-dominated Soviet Union to a sovereign state in its own right. However, in the early 90s, it still remained comparatively weaker (both in size and in military capability). It had yet to fully consolidate its``inherited" military capability - and what precisely it would inherit remained up for debate. Ukraine was in a peculiar situation where it could, to some extent, "choose" how much power it would have for itself - that is, how much of the Soviet military remaining on its territory would be returned to Russia.<br /><br />Ukraine's choice to give up its nuclear arsenal can be understood in the context of the model as an attempt to credibly commit to not exploit future bargaining leverage &nbsp;by "smoothing" its rise relative to Russia. By giving up some of its future power (and future access to benefits), Ukraine made it more likely that Russia and Ukraine could reach the Pareto-optimal "no war" outcome in the 90s. Russia was better off choosing not to fight Ukraine and Ukraine would be better off not being invaded. Given the option to credibly commit to constrain its rise, Ukraine chose to do so. Additionally, because of substantially diminishing marginal returns to nuclear capabilities, Ukraine's "self-constraining" choice to give up its nuclear capability did not appreciably increase Russia's leverage over Ukraine. A Ukraine with 1,000 nuclear weapons is much more threatening to Russia than one with zero. Conversely, a Russia with 7,000 nuclear weapons is relatively comparable to one with 8,000.<br /><br />Under the Powell model, had Ukraine chosen to not give up its nuclear weapons, Russia would have been much more likely at the time to take preemptive action to secure its arsenal by force. The deterrence argument is moot. If nuclear weapons had any meaningful deterrent effect on Russia, then Russia would likely have acted militarily in the 90s to prevent a nuclear Ukraine rather than let Ukraine wield its leverage in the future. This might have taken on a much larger character than the current action in Crimea, particularly as the loyalties of the formerly Soviet "Ukrainian" military forces at the time were much less clear than they are now. Given the relative "newness" of an independent Ukrainian state, an occupation would not be out of the question. While Mearsheimer's original article briefly considered the possibility of a pre-emptive Russian attack, it dismisses it much too quickly and easily. Although it argues that a pre-emptive war between Ukraine and Russia in 1993 would be risky, it fails to run the clock back even further and consider why Russia chose to not pre-empt Ukraine at an even earlier time (when the Ukrainian command and control was less established)&nbsp;<i>unless</i>&nbsp;it was convinced of Ukrainian denuclearization.&nbsp;Perhaps Ukrainian nuclear weapons were simply not a sufficient cause for preemption in this counterfactual 1990s. But if this is the case, then it is unlikely that they would be a credible constraint on Russia now, particularly for the type of war we are seeing right now in Crimea (as opposed to a full occupation). The Kargil crisis between India and Pakistan illustrates that a conventional, limited conflict between two nuclear powers over a disputed territory is a distinct possibility - an example of the classic "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability%E2%80%93instability_paradox">stability-instability paradox</a>." Either way, the case for a Ukrainian deterrent falls flat.<br /><br />Denuclearization was a near-necessity for state survival. It is unlikely that Ukraine could have retained its nuclear weapons arsenal in a world where it refused to bargain with Russia over their removal. This explains why Ukraine settled for a relatively toothless negative security assurance in exchange for the cost of transferring its nuclear arsenal - it would not have been able to keep them either way. The weakness of its security assurance reflected the bargaining facts on the ground. Russia simply did not have to offer Ukraine much to secure its arsenal since giving up its nukes was a Pareto-improving move. At the time, the nuclear arsenal was more of a curse than a blessing for Ukraine.<br /><br />I certainly condemn Russia's actions and think the rest of the world should do what it can (which is admittedly not much at the moment) to return the situation to <i>status quo ante</i>. But in our rush to figure out how the Crimean invasion could have been prevented, we should not imagine that a simple reversal of a 20-year-old decision could have so easily solved the current crisis. It is better to understand the reasons why states may have chosen to behave the way they did rather than attributing foreign policy decisions to "error." Nor should we conclude that the non-proliferation agenda is somehow doomed because leaders will learn from Ukraine's example. States are already fully cognizant of the utility (and, in many cases disutility) of nuclear weapons - another case isn't going to magically change their minds. The question we should be asking is <i>why</i>&nbsp;states still refrain from proliferating <i>despite</i>&nbsp;cases like Libya and Ukraine.&nbsp;And indeed, what the full story of Ukraine's denuclearization tells us is that Ukraine had very logical reasons for giving up its inherited deterrent. The scenario of a nuclear Ukraine in the 1990s would have been much, much worse - both for Ukraine and likely the world.<br /><br />Edit: <a href="http://fparena.blogspot.com/">Phil Arena </a>reminded me that this argument is very similar to a point <a href="http://wjspaniel.wordpress.com/">William Spaniel</a> makes in his dissertation. You can find a paper version of that article <a href="http://wjspaniel.wordpress.com/papers/">here</a> ("The Theory of Butter-for-Bombs Agreements")Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-48744958813052418282013-07-16T15:29:00.001-07:002013-07-17T07:34:25.588-07:00Some more evidence that Florida's 'Stand Your Ground' law increased firearm homicide ratesThe acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin has rightly turned attention to the permissiveness of Florida's self-defense laws. Although the state's 2005 "Stand your Ground" law was not used by the defense, it nevertheless <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/03/us-usa-florida-shooting-idUSBRE9620RL20130703" target="_blank">framed </a>the Zimmerman case from the very beginning. References to "Stand your Ground" and self-defense were&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/trayvon-martin-and-the-irony-of-american-justice/277782/" target="_blank">included&nbsp;</a>in&nbsp;the judge's instructions to the jury, and in a post-verdict interview, one of the jurors <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/16/3502481/juror-we-talked-stand-your-ground.html" target="_blank">admitted</a> that the law factored into their decision.<br /><br />Under the common law "Castle doctrine" principle, individuals facing an imminent threat of death or bodily harm do not have a duty to retreat and may respond with force when in one's home. Stand Your Ground laws (SYG) generally extend this principle to any location where a person has a legal right to be and allow the use of deadly force in self-defense when an individual is presumed to have a "reasonable fear" of death or severe bodily injury. Since the passage of Florida's law in 2005, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/07/15/everything-you-need-to-know-about-stand-your-ground-laws/" target="_blank">over thirty </a>states have followed suit and adopted similar expansions of the Castle doctrine.<br /><br />By definition, SYG laws make homicide less costly by providing the attacker with an additional legal defense. Indeed, as expected, these laws are associated with greater numbers of homicides that are ruled "justifiable." More troubling is that determinations of "justifiability" exhibit a <a href="http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/07/13/stand-your-ground-laws-increases-racial-bias-in-justifiable-homicide-trials/" target="_blank">stark racial bias</a> in both SYG and non-SYG states - white-on-black killings are the most likely to be ruled justifiable, with while black-on-white killings are the least likely.<br /><br />Defenders of SYG laws argue that, although homicides are more likely to be ruled justified, SYG can be expected to reduce the overall rate of homicide and violent crime. By permitting persons being attacked to retaliate in full force rather than retreating, SYG laws theoretically increase the costs of committing a violent offense. Even if justifiable homicides increase, defenders would argue that these homicides <i>substitute</i>&nbsp;for otherwise non-justifiable homicides. The net homicide and violent crime rates, in the presence of SYG laws, should decrease.<br /><br />Two recent studies find the opposite. Far from deterring homicide, SYG laws increase its incidence. Moreover, the laws have no appreciable deterrent effect on violent crime. Analyzing data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting system, <a href="http://econweb.tamu.edu/mhoekstra/castle_doctrine.pdf" target="_blank">Cheng and Hoekstra</a> find that SYG laws lead to roughly an 8% increase in reported murders and non-negligent manslaughters. <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w18187" target="_blank">McClellan and Terkin</a> find a similar effect on firearm homicides and firearm accidents using monthly data from the CDC. These findings are consistent with a different understanding of the incentives generated by Stand Your Ground. Rather than increase the costs of violence, SYG laws decrease them by expanding the range of legal defenses available to an attacker. Because of the vagueness of the "presumption of reasonable fear," and the absence of many third-party witnesses, SYG laws<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/07/george_zimmerman_and_self_defense_why_it_was_too_easy_for_him_to_get_off.html" target="_blank"> stack the deck in favor of an assailant</a> by raising the prosecution's evidentiary burden (as was made clear in the Zimmerman trial).<br /><br />Whether SYG laws increase or reduce murder rates is an important policy question deserving of further study. The Cheng/Hoekstra and McClellan/Terkin papers provide convincing evidence, but it is always valuable to re-examine any scientific finding using different approaches and methods. Both of these studies use standard panel regression techniques to estimate the causal effect of Stand Your Ground laws while controlling for other potential confounders. While parametric regression is an ubiquitous and powerful tool for causal inference, it is a very model-dependent approach. This can sometimes lead to misleading conclusions when the model gets too far away from the data.<br /><br />Any approach to figuring out whether some "treatment" T causes Y relies on comparing the factual (what actually happened) to the counterfactual (what would have happened had T been different). The fundamental problem of causal inference is that we can never observe the counterfactual - we only see what happened. Statistical approaches to determining causality rely on <i>estimating </i>an appropriate counterfactual from the data. The ideal counterfactual is a case that is identical to the "factual" one on all relevant characteristics except for T. However, such cases are often lacking. There is no exact copy of Florida somewhere in the U.S. that did not pass Stand Your Ground. Ideally we would like to pick the closest case possible, but even then such a case may be nonexistent, particularly when potential confounding variables for which we would like to control are highly correlated with our treatment. The counterfactual may be a case that has never been seen before. When regression techniques are used to estimate these "extreme" counterfactuals, they rely on <i>extrapolation</i>&nbsp;outside of the scope of the observed data. As Gary King and Langche Zeng <a href="http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/counterf.pdf" target="_blank">show</a>, such extrapolations are highly dependent on often indefensible modeling assumptions that become more and more tenuous as one gets further and further away from the data. Slight alterations to the model can yield drastically different results. Moreover, typical ways of presenting regression results (tables of coefficients) rarely make the counterfactual apparent. It is very difficult to get a sense of the extent to which the results in an empirical paper are based on extrapolation. While robustness checks help, basic regression papers often obscure the factual/counterfactual comparison on which a causal claim is based. This is not to say that regression is useless or that the Cheng/Hoekstra and McClellan/Terkin results are fundamentally flawed. However, it is worthwhile to see whether the finding holds when using a different approach to causal inference.<br /><br />Instead of regression, I use the&nbsp;<i>Synthetic Control </i>method&nbsp;<a href="http://www.mit.edu/~jhainm/Paper/ccs.pdf" target="_blank">developed </a>by Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller to estimate the effect of Florida's 2005 Stand Your Ground law on firearm homicide rates. This method has been used to evaluate comparable state-level interventions. Abadie and Gardeazebal (2003) use it to measure the effect of terrorism on economic growth in the Basque Country while Abadie et.al. (2010) assess the impact of California's Proposition 99 on cigarette sales. Synthetic control methods compare the factual time series of the outcome variable in a unit exposed to the treatment (Florida) with a "synthetic" counterfactual constructed by weighting a set of "donor" units not exposed to the treatment (states without SYG) such that the synthetic control matches the factual unit as closely as possible on potential confounding variables and pre-treatment outcomes. By forcing the weights to be positive and sum to one, this method ensures that the estimated counterfactual stays within the bounds of the data, thereby guarding against extrapolation. The intuition is that a combination of control states can approximate the counterfactual of "Florida without Stand Your Ground" better than any one state. The "synthetic" Florida provides a baseline for comparing homicide rates after SYG was implemented in 2005. It would certainly be possible to use the synthetic control approach to evaluate the effect of SYG in other states. However, I focus here on Florida because it was the earliest to enact such a law and has the most years for which the effects of SYG can be observed.<br /><br />I use state-level mortality data from the <a href="http://wonder.cdc.gov/" target="_blank">CDC's Wonder </a>database to construct a measure of per-capita firearm homicides for each state in years 2000 to 2010. Following the lists in Cheng/Hoekstra and McClellan/Terkin I also obtain a set of state-level covariates from Census, BLS and DOJ data sources related to age and racial composition of the population, poverty, median income, urbanization, unemployment, incarceration, and federal police presence. All of the covariates are measured in 2000 - prior to the start of the time-series.<br /><br />The rapid adoption of SYG laws after 2005 unfortunately limits the set of "donor" states available for constructing the synthetic control. Only 22 states do not have a "Stand Your Ground"-equivalent law in force during the 2000-2010 period: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin. Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania passed SYG laws in 2011. Additionally, because of data privacy concerns, the CDC does not report data for regions where a sufficiently small number of events occurred, which further constrains the total set of viable donor states. Nevertheless, the pool of donors is able to provide a reasonable synthetic counterfactual for Florida.<br /><br />Florida's SYG was passed in October, 2005 meaning that it really only affected years 2006 onward. Matching Florida to the pool of controls on the set of covariates and on firearm homicide rates from 2000 to 2005 yields a synthetic counterfactual that reasonably approximates Florida's pre-SYG homicide patterns. The figure below plots the actual trajectory of Florida's firearm homicide rate relative to the path followed by the synthetic Florida sans-SYG. Homicide rates in actual and synthetic Florida match up rather well in the 2000-2005 period. However, from 2006-2010, the factual and counterfactual diverge dramatically. Florida's firearm homicide rate sees a huge increase from 2006 to 2007, while the synthetic rate begins to decline. Although rates drop from 2007 to 2010, they remain significantly higher than they would have been had SYG not been in place. The results suggest that that Florida experienced about 1-1.5 more annual homicides from 2006-2010 than it would have had Stand Your Ground not been implemented.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-R-as-_Hpc48/UeWjmG4voxI/AAAAAAAAAOg/rwVuThVetXU/s1600/Figure0-Florida-firearmhomicide-basic.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-R-as-_Hpc48/UeWjmG4voxI/AAAAAAAAAOg/rwVuThVetXU/s320/Figure0-Florida-firearmhomicide-basic.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Firearm homicide rates in Florida - Actual vs. Synthetic Control</td></tr></tbody></table><br />As with all statistical techniques, it's important to evaluate how unlikely it is that the observed pattern was generated purely by randomness. That is, how significant is this result? Although there are no specific parameters and standard errors to estimate, one can get a sense of the "statistical significance" of the apparent effect of SYG using placebo tests on our donor pool. A placebo test applies the same synthetic control techniques to cases known to be unaffected by the treatment. The resulting distribution of "placebo effects" gives a sense of &nbsp;the types of patterns that we would see under the hypothesis of no effect - that is, pure randomness. If the pattern exhibited by Florida appears unusual relative to then one can be relatively confident that it is not due to chance.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--jWwfmnGpy8/UeWjdbvGqhI/AAAAAAAAAOY/HWpH3mhD5EY/s1600/Figure1-Florida-firearmhomicide.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--jWwfmnGpy8/UeWjdbvGqhI/AAAAAAAAAOY/HWpH3mhD5EY/s320/Figure1-Florida-firearmhomicide.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Firearm homicide rates in Florida - Placebo tests<br />(Discards states with pre-2006 MSPE five times higher than Florida's)</td></tr></tbody></table><br />The figure above plots the gap in firearm homicide rates between the actual time series and the estimated synthetic control for Florida and for each of the control states. Relative to the distribution of relevant placebos, the Florida effect stands out post-2006. Florida's is the most unusual line in the set and from 2007-2010 shows a positive deviation from the control greater than any of the placebo tests. Although the pool of control states is somewhat small, limiting the number of possible placebo tests, the trajectory of Florida's homicide rate is certainly unusual and difficult to attribute to pure chance.<br /><br />Supporters of Florida's law point to <a href="http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2012/mar/23/dennis-baxley/crime-rates-florida-have-dropped-stand-your-ground/" target="_blank">reductions</a> in the violent crime rate since 2005 as evidence that the law's deterrent effect is working. However, just looking at a trend as evidence of causation makes no sense - in order to assign causality, one needs to make a comparison with some counterfactual case. Violent crime rates in Florida have been overall declining since 2000, so it is unlikely that the downward trend would not have existed had SYG not been passed.<br /><br />Unfortunately, it is difficult to evaluate whether SYG reduced violent crime rates using a synthetic control approach because no good counterfactual exists in the data. Florida generally has some of the highest violent crime rates in the country and they are consistently higher than those of any of the states in the donor pool (New Mexico is close, but still lower). As a consequence, it is impossible to find any combination of control states that consistently match Florida's pre-2005 trend. Any counterfactual for Florida's overall violent crime rate would rely heavily on extrapolation outside of the data.<br /><br />While these results are certainly not definitive (the relative novelty of SYG laws limits the number of periods under observation), they corroborate existing findings. Florida's Stand Your Ground law did not have a deterrence effect on homicide, and may in fact have increased the state's murder rate. This and other evidence strongly suggests that state governments should re-think their approach to self-defense laws. While politically appealing from a "tough on crime" perspective, Stand Your Ground laws likely do much more harm than good.<br /><br /><i>Edit 7/17 - Fixed broken links</i>Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-87925948113122303542013-06-23T08:43:00.001-07:002013-06-23T09:54:05.626-07:00I guessed wrong (kind of)In a <a href="http://causalloop.blogspot.com/2013/06/will-edward-snowden-be-extradited.html" target="_blank">recent post</a>, I argued that Edward Snowden's extradition from Hong Kong was likely. Now&nbsp;<a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1267261/snowden-leaves-hong-kong-commercial-flight-moscow" target="_blank">this</a> happens:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">US whistle-blower Edward Snowden has left Hong Kong and is on a commercial flight to Russia, but Moscow will not be his final destination.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">The fugitive whistle-blower boarded the Moscow-bound flight earlier on Sunday and would continue on to another country, possibly Cuba then Venezuela, according to media reports.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">The Hong Kong government said in a statement that Snowden had departed "on his own accord for a third country through a lawful and normal channel".</blockquote>&nbsp;The Hong Kong government played the politics of this case very well. From their <a href="http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/201306/23/P201306230476.htm" target="_blank">press release</a><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The US Government earlier on made a request to the HKSAR Government for the issue of a provisional warrant of arrest against Mr Snowden. Since the documents provided by the US Government did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law, the HKSAR Government has requested the US Government to provide additional information so that the Department of Justice could consider whether the US Government's request can meet the relevant legal conditions. As the HKSAR Government has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong.</blockquote>Provisions that allow for requests of "additional information" are common in many extradition treaties. Certainly its not known what was in the documents provided by the United States government and precisely how they did not comply with Hong Kong law, but it is very clear that this was the easiest way to deny extradition without explicitly refusing it. Snowden's case is a particularly challenging one, given that the U.S. <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/edward-snowden-complaint-unsealed-93181.html" target="_blank">chose to indict</a> Snowden under the Espionage act. The Hong Kong government may have a strong argument that the initial documents were insufficient, even if it's unlikely that the United States will believe it. The novelty of this case makes a request for additional information perfectly legitimate, even if &nbsp;convenient given Snowden's subsequent departure. While the H.K.-U.S. legal cooperation may have been somewhat slighted, the HK government's decision is unlikely to affect its relationships with other states since they held to the letter and intent of the treaty and, more importantly, China did not appear to overtly intervene.<br /><br />So, I was wrong...somewhat. In the original post, I included the caveat that my prediction assumed Snowden would not choose to flee Hong Kong, since a long and drawn-out extradition process would also give him ample time to escape. I thought that for Snowden, transit to a non-extraditable third country was undesirable, otherwise he would have simply gone there in the first place. However, it appears that self-preservation ultimately won out and Venezuela is Snowden's new destination. lthough the United States does have an extradition treaty with Venezuela, it <a href="http://www.oas.org/juridico/mla/en/traites/en_traites-ext-usa-ven.pdf" target="_blank">dates back to 1923.</a>&nbsp;Moreover, the U.S. and Venezuela historically have had an extremely rocky relationship over legal cooperation particularly after the high profile&nbsp;<a href="http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_16970097" target="_blank">refusal</a>&nbsp;of the U.S. to extradite accused airline bomber Luis Posada Carriles .The current Venezuelan government certainly would oppose Snowden's transfer, but even if it chose to dust off the old agreement and comply with its exact provisions, the United States would have an extremely weak case. Unlike the U.S.-HK agreement, it does not have a mutual criminality clause, meaning that the only offenses that are extraditable are the ones explicitly listed in the agreement. The list is very short and <i>extremely dated</i>&nbsp;("willfull and unlawful destruction or obstruction of railroads" is the 6th offense on the list). Espionage would certainly be treated as a political offense, and under Article 3, even offenses <i>connected</i>&nbsp;to a political offense (in Snowden's case, "theft of government property") are non-extraditable. Despite the treaty, Snowden seems to be untouchable while in Venezuela.&nbsp;<i>[EDIT: Apparently Snowden is instead seeking <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2013/jun/23/edward-snowden-leaves-hong-kong-moscow-live" target="_blank">asylum in Ecuador</a>]</i><br /><br />While it is impossible to know what would have happened had Snowden stayed in HK, his flight does suggest that he did not believe that his defense against extradition would have been successful. The HKSAR's hands are more tied than are Venezuela's. All things being equal, Snowden would certainly have preferred to stay in HK rather than Venezuela. However, the Hong Kong government seemed to have made it clear that it could not hold out against extradition for much longer without putting its legal arrangements into much more serious jeopardy. That China chose not to explicitly intervene at the outset does illustrate that international law does operate as a constraint, even if states can strategically use it to their advantage. Delaying extradition while offloading Snowden to a less constrained third party was an inexpensive way of satisfying the Chinese government's preference against extradition while minimizing damage to Hong Kong's international legal standing.<br /><br />The closing paragraph of the press release is also absolutely perfect from a political standpoint<br /><blockquote>Meanwhile, the HKSAR Government has formally written to the US Government requesting clarification on earlier reports about the hacking of computer systems in Hong Kong by US government agencies. The HKSAR Government will continue to follow up on the matter so as to protect the legal rights of the people of Hong Kong.</blockquote>Translation: "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsW9MlYu31g" target="_blank">I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further"</a>Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-3396226188785830612013-06-17T11:54:00.001-07:002013-06-18T05:20:24.686-07:00Marginal Effect Plots for Interaction Models in R<script type="text/x-mathjax-config">MathJax.Hub.Config({ tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]} }); </script><script src="http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=default" type="text/javascript"></script>Political scientists often want to test hypotheses regarding <a href="http://localgov.fsu.edu/readings_papers/Research%20Methods/Brambor_et_al_Multipolicative_Interactions.pdf" target="_blank">interactive relationships</a>. Typically, a theory might imply that the effect of one variable on another depends on the value of some third quantity. For example, political structures like institutional rules might mediate the effect of individual preferences on political behavior. Scholars using regression to test these types of hypotheses will include interaction terms in their models. These models take on the basic form (in the linear case)<br /><div><br /></div><div>$$y = \beta_0 + \beta_1x_1 + \beta_2x_2 + \beta_3x_1x_2 + \epsilon$$</div><div><br /></div><div>where $\beta_3$ is the coefficient on the "interaction term" $x_1x_2$. However, interaction terms are often tricky to work with. Bear Braumoeller's 2004 <a href="http://www.braumoeller.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Interaction-Terms.pdf">article</a> in International Organization illustrated how published quantitative papers often made basic mistakes in interpreting interaction models. Scholars frequently would mis-interpret the lower-order coefficients, $\beta_1$ and $\beta_2$. Published research articles would argue that a significant coefficient on $x_1$ &nbsp;suggests a meaningful relationship between $x_1$ and $y$. In a model with an interaction term, this is not necessarily the case. The marginal effect of $x_1$ on $y$ in a linear model is not equal to $\beta_1$, it is actually $\beta_1 + \beta_2x_2$. That is, $\beta_1$, is the relationship between $x_1$ and $y$&nbsp;<i>when $x_2$ is zero.</i>&nbsp;Often this is a meaningless quantity since some variables (for example, the age of a registered voter) cannot possibly equal zero.</div><div><br /></div><div>The correct way to interpret an interaction model is to plot out the relationship between $x_1$ and $y$ for the possible values of $x_2$. It's not a matter of simply looking at a single coefficient and declaring a positive or negative effect. Even if the interaction coefficient $\beta_3$ is significant, the actual meaning of the interaction can differ. One interpretation may be that $x_1$ is always positively related with y, but the effect is greater for some values of $x_2$. Another is that $x_1$ is <i>sometimes</i>&nbsp;positively associated with $y$ and <i>sometimes</i>&nbsp;negatively associated with y, depending on the value of $x_2$. Looking only at the coefficients does not capture these two different types of relationships.</div><div><br /></div><div>Luckily, figuring out the marginal effect of $x_1$ on $y$ is rather easy. In a linear model, the point estimate for how much $y$ increases when $x_1$ is increased by 1, $\hat{\delta_1}$, is equal to</div><div><br /></div><div>$$\hat{\delta_1} = \hat{\beta_1} + \hat{\beta_3}x_2$$</div><div><br /></div><div>The variance of the estimator $\hat{\delta_1}$ is</div><div><br /></div><div>$$Var(\delta_1) = Var(\hat{\beta_1} + \hat{\beta_3}x_2)$$</div><div>$$Var(\delta_1) = Var(\hat{\beta_1}) + Var(\hat{\beta_3}x_2) + 2Cov(\hat{\beta_1}, \hat{\beta_3}x_2)$$</div><div>$$Var(\delta_1) = Var(\hat{\beta_1}) + x_2^2Var(\hat{\beta_3}) + 2x_2Cov(\hat{\beta_1}, \hat{\beta_3})$$</div><div><br /></div><div>Note that when $x_2 = 0$, $\hat{\delta_1} = \hat{\beta_1}$ and $Var(\hat{\delta_1}) = Var(\hat{\beta_1})$. The standard deviation or standard error of $\hat{\delta_1}$ is equal to the square root of this variance. Extending these formulae to the non-linear case is easy - the coefficient estimates and variances are computed the same way, and from there one can simulate relevant quantities of interest (probabilities, predicted counts).</div><div><br /></div><div>An even simpler way to calculate the marginal effect of $x_1$ for an arbitrary value of $x_2$ is to re-center $x_2$ by subtracting from it some value $k$<i>&nbsp;</i>and re-estimating the regression model. The coefficient and standard error of $x_1$ will be the marginal effect of x_1 on&nbsp;&nbsp;y when $x_2 = k$. A handy trick is to mean-center $x_2$ (subtract the mean of $x_2$ from each value of $x_2$). Then, the coefficient on $x_1$ (in a linear model) is equal to the <i>average</i>&nbsp;effect of $x_1$ on $y$ over all of the values of $x_2$.*</div><div><br /></div><div>Braumoeller's article came with Stata code to make interaction plots (though I can't seem to find it online anymore). In 2011, Stata 12 added the <a href="http://www.stata.com/features/overview/marginal-analysis/">marginsplot </a>command, making these sorts of figures even easier to create. Quantitative political scientists appear to have taken notice. I could not find a single article in the 2012/2013 issues of the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and International Organization that used an interaction model without including a corresponding marginal effects plot. Correctly interpreting interaction effects is now about as easy as running the regression itself.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is all well and good for Stata users, but what about R? Coding up these sorts of plots from scratch can get a little tedious, and no canned function (to my knowledge) exists on CRAN. Moreover, the availability of easy-to-use functions for statistical methods seems to encourage wider use among applied quantitative researchers.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>So <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9-21uJFs1X5RlhHVzRSMGExTFU/edit" target="_blank">here's my code</a> for quickly making decent-looking two-variable interaction plots in R. The first function, <i>interaction_plot_continuous(), </i>plots the estimated marginal effect for one variable that is interacted with a continuous "moderator." In simple terms, it plots $\delta_1$ for the range of values of $x_2$.<br /><br />Below is an example of the output. For the sake of demonstration, I took the built-in R dataset <i>airquality, </i>which contains air quality measurements in New York taken during the 70s, and regressed maximum daily temperature on ozone content, wind speed and an interaction of ozone and wind. The plot below shows the marginal effect of wind speed moderated by ozone content:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ivU5GU4YSr4/Ub9jjswLuDI/AAAAAAAAAM4/ziX5iJzEONE/s1600/air_quality_interaction.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ivU5GU4YSr4/Ub9jjswLuDI/AAAAAAAAAM4/ziX5iJzEONE/s320/air_quality_interaction.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />Note that just interpreting the main effect of wind speed at zero (the regression coefficient) gives a misleading picture of the actual relationship. At 0 parts per billion of ozone, wind speed is negatively associated with temperature. But for higher values of ozone content wind speed becomes positively associated with temperature (I have no idea why this is the case, or why there would even be an interaction - my guess is there's some omitted variable). For the average value of ozone concentration (the red-dashed line), wind speed is not significantly associated with temperature.<br /><br />Sometimes the moderating variable is a binary indicator. In these cases, a continuous interaction plot like the one above is probably less useful - we just want the effect when the moderator is "0" and when it's "1". The second function in the file, <i>interaction_plot_binary(), </i>handles this case. Again to demonstrate, I took the classic LaLonde job training experiment dataset and fitted a simple (and very much wrong) regression model. The model predicted real 1978 wages using assignment to a job training program (treatment), marital status and an interaction of the two. I then estimated the marginal "effect" of treatment assignment on wages for each of the two marital status levels. In this case, the interaction was not statistically significant.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K1lsPJ-ItHs/Ub9jma2bYHI/AAAAAAAAANA/cdjd5EItm0E/s1600/lalonde_interaction_binary.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K1lsPJ-ItHs/Ub9jma2bYHI/AAAAAAAAANA/cdjd5EItm0E/s320/lalonde_interaction_binary.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />So hopefully these two functions will save R users some time. Note that these functions also work perfectly fine with non-linear models, but the quantity plotted will be the regression coefficient and not necessarily something with substantive meaning. Unlike simple OLS, the coefficients of most non-linear models do not have a clear interpretation. You'll have to do a little bit of work to convert the coefficient estimates into something actually meaningful.<br /><br />Feel free to copy and share this code, and let me know if there are any bugs. If there's enough demand, I might clean it up more and put together an R package (time permitting of course).</div><div><br /></div><div><i>* I'm using the word "effect" here loosely and as shorthand for "relationship between." Assigning a causal relationship between two variables requires further conditional independence assumptions that may or may not hold.</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>Edit: Thanks to Patrick Lam for pointing out a typo in the variance formula (missed the 2) - fixed above and in the code.</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>Edit 6/18: Forgot to also include a link to Brambor, Clark, and Golder's excellent <a href="http://localgov.fsu.edu/readings_papers/Research%20Methods/Brambor_et_al_Multipolicative_Interactions.pdf" target="_blank">2006 paper</a> in Political Analysis which discussed similar issues regarding interpretation of interaction terms.</i></div>Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-67573511108989070802013-06-10T11:34:00.000-07:002013-06-10T11:34:34.593-07:00Will Edward Snowden be Extradited?On Sunday, 29-year old Booz Allen Hamilton employee Edward Snowden was<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance"> revealed </a>to be the source behind the recent disclosure of highly classified documents describing top secret National Security Agency surveillance programs of telephone and internet data. Snowden disclosed his identity to the Guardian in an interview from Hong Kong, where he currently remains. His choice to leave the U.S. for Hong Kong was, in his words, driven by the belief that the Chinese-administered region has a "spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent." But Snowden is not completely free from the reach of U.S. law. The United States and Hong Kong have in force an extradition treaty under which the U.S. could obtain his return for prosecution.<br /><br />Why did Snowden escape to Hong Kong, likely knowing that he could be extradited? My sense is that it isn't because he was poorly informed, but rather because his no-extradition alternatives were not particularly great. The overlap between countries with "spirited commitments" to freedom and countries with which the United States does not have an extradition treaty is virtually nil. Even Iceland, Snowden's asylum target, has an extradition treaty with the U.S. in force since the 1900s.<br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/United_States_extradition_treaties_countries.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="148" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/United_States_extradition_treaties_countries.PNG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19.1875px; text-align: start;">Countries the US has extradition treaties with (light blue, US shown here in dark blue) From <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_extradition_treaties_countries.PNG">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></td></tr></tbody></table>But will Snowden be extradited back to the United States? I would argue that yes, extradition is probable*, but the process will be very tedious simply because the offense is so different from previous extradition cases. Whereas most extradition requests concern explicitly criminal matters, Snowden's may be a "political offense" for which extradition is not permitted. Working out this question will take time, but Hong Kong's track record of typically approving requests suggests that the odds are in the U.S. government's favor. Moreover, I do not think that Beijing will be able to tip the legal scales towards rejection if it so desires, despite its influence in Hong Kong.<br /><br />China's preferences in this matter are certainly relevant, but the law is much more of a constraint in this process than <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/06/whats_the_deal_with_hong_kong.php">some commentators</a> have suggested. The security stakes are actually rather low. Snowden is not particularly useful as an intelligence asset. He no longer has access to NSA databases - all he has are whatever documents or files he could bring with him to Hong Kong, documents that were apparently selectively chosen. This is not a Cablegate-style data-dump and PRISM is hardly China's greatest intelligence fear. Certainly Beijing might want to obtain anything that Snowden still has in his possession, but it's unclear how cooperative he would be given his political leanings.<br /><br />Influencing the extradition proceedings is also not costless for Beijing. Despite China's sovereignty over Hong Kong, the SAR has significant political autonomy in most areas. Indeed, it can and has concluded a number of extradition and mutual legal assistance treaties with other states. Hong Kong is a global financial hub and devotes significant legal and administrative resources to combating money laundering, financial crimes, trafficking and other such offenses. The high cross-border mobility of these types of offenders gives the Government of Hong Kong significant incentives to maintain the integrity of its extradition agreements in order to prosecute financial criminals who flee its territory. Undue influence by Beijing in the process might jeopardize the credibility of Hong Kong's other agreements. While China's ability to weigh in on extradition is clear, the decision to refuse extradition ultimately lies with the Chief Executive of Hong Kong.<br /><br />Moreover, Hong Kong is also much more limited in its ability to reject extradition than some news reports have suggested. <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1257639/treaty-gives-hong-kong-option-reject-snowden-extradition-us">This </a>South China Morning Post article, <a href="http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/hong-kong-can-refuse-u-s-extradition-requests/">quoted</a> by Doug Mataconis at OTB, gives the impression that China has de-facto veto power over any extradition request. This is not the case.<br /><br />The SCMP article states that, according to the 1996 treaty, "Hong Kong has the "right of refusal when surrender implicates the 'defense, foreign affairs or essential public interest or policy'." However, this provision is irrelevant to the Snowden case since, according to Article 3, it only applies when the subject of the extradition request is a national of the PRC.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">...(3) The executive authority of the Government of Hong Kong reserves the right to r<b>efuse the surrender of nationals of the State whose government is responsible for the foreign affairs relating to Hong Kong </b>in cases in which:&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">(a) The requested surrender relates to the defence, foreign affairs or essential public interest or policy of the State whose government is responsible for the foreign affairs relating to Hong Kong, or...</blockquote>The article also notes that Hong Kong could reject a request if it determines that the extradition is "politically motivated." However, the article omits the fact that this determination is to be made by the "competent authority of the requested Party" which, according to the <a href="http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-105erpt2/html/CRPT-105erpt2.htm">committee report </a>that accompanied the treaty's ratification, is interpreted as the judiciary and not the executive of Hong Kong.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">...Notwithstanding the terms of paragraph (2) of this Article, surrender<b> shall not be granted if the competent authority of the requested Party</b>, which for the United States shall be the executive authority, determines:&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">(a) that the request was politically motivated...</blockquote>Meddling with Hong Kong's independent judiciary would be politically costly for Beijing. In fact, it could jeopardize the extradition agreement itself. When the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty, it attached an understanding emphasizing the continued independence of Hong Kong's judiciary<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Any attempt by the Government of Hong Kong or the Government of the People's Republic of China to curtail the jurisdiction and power of final adjudication of the Hong Kong courts may be considered grounds for withdrawal from the Agreement."</blockquote>It's unlikely that Snowden could win a political persecution argument. Regardless of whether his actions are justified, they very clearly violated U.S. statute - he is not being arbitrarily singled out. A more potentially persuasive case for refusal might be made in light of Bradley Manning's treatment in<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/09/has-the-us-become-the-kind-of-nation-from-which-you-have-to-seek-asylum/"> pre-trial detention</a>. Article 7 permits the refusal of extradition "when such surrender is likely to entail exceptionally serious consequences related to age or health." However, concerns over treatment are typically resolved by bilateral legal assurances that the extradited person will not be mistreated. Indeed, U.S. authorities have strong incentives to not mistreat Snowden if he is extradited as such actions would likely jeopardize future legal cooperation with Hong Kong.<br /><br />This is not to say that extradition is a sure thing, but the challenges facing Snowden's extradition are currently more legal than political. Pretty much all previous extradition proceedings between the U.S. and Hong Kong have concerned clear-cut criminal offenses - violent and white-collar crimes in particular. Hong Kong has <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/world/asia/edward-snowden-hong-kong-extradition.html?pagewanted=all">consistently</a> accepted U.S. requests for extradition for these cases. But the leaking of classified information <a href="http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/06/10/the_risky_legal_strategy_behind_edward_snowdens_flight_to_hong_kong">might fall under</a> the category of "political offenses" for which extradition is prohibited. Extradition treaties have, for centuries contained provisions that refuse extradition for "offenses of a political character." The exception emerged in treaties during the 1800s as a way of limiting the ability of states to pursue dissenters and political opponents. However, interpretation of what constitutes a "political offense" has always been unclear and open to interpretation. Fearing that a vague interpretation of "political offense" would unduly burden states, most treaties since then have included provisions delineating offenses that cannot be considered "political." Compared to most modern treaties, the U.S.-Hong Kong treaty has relatively few political offense exceptions: murder or other crimes committed against a head of state are exempt as are offenses criminalized by a multilateral international agreement. This leaves a lot of grey area.<br /><br />Most treaties signed in the last half-century do not explicitly enumerate offenses for which extradition is granted, typically defining an extraditable offense as anything criminalized under the laws of both parties. However, the Hong Kong treaty has both a list and a provision for extradition for "dual criminality." A request for extradition under the Espionage Act would likely fall under the scope of extraditable offenses since Hong Kong's Official Secrets Ordinance has similar provisions criminalizing the release of classified information, but could potentially be ruled a political offense. Law professor Julian Ku suggests that the U.S. might choose to pursue an alternative route and <a href="http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/06/10/the_risky_legal_strategy_behind_edward_snowdens_flight_to_hong_kong">seek extradition </a>under an offense explicitly enumerated in the treaty.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The Snowden leaks have now been referred to the Justice Department, and U.S. prosecutors have several options available to them. According to Ku, prosecutors may avoid charging Snowden under the Espionage Act -- which could be considered a political prosecution by courts in Hong Kong -- and indict him under a different statute.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Among the crimes listed on the U.S.-Hong Kong agreement as within the bounds of extradition, one offense in particular stands out: "the unlawful use of computers."</blockquote>Requesting extradition for an explicitly enumerated offense might help support an argument that the offense is not a political one. The patchwork of U.S. classification law also appears to have provisions relating to the "unlawful use of computers" - the&nbsp;Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. &nbsp;According to a<a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/secrecy/R41404.pdf">&nbsp;CRS report</a>,<br /><blockquote>18 U.S.C. Section 1030(a)(1) punishes the willful retention, communication, or transmission, etc., of classified information retrieved by means of knowingly accessing a computer without (or in excess of) authorization, with reason to believe that such information “could be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”...The provision imposes a fine or imprisonment for not more than 10 years, or both, in the case of a first offense or attempted violation. Repeat offenses or attempts can incur a prison sentence of up to 20 years. </blockquote>Moreover, the sentences under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are comparable to those in the relevant Espionage Act provisions. Assuming U.S. prosecutors are strategic, I would expect the forthcoming request &nbsp;to be for offenses under the CFAA and not the Espionage Act.<br /><br />The base rate for extradition approval is high so the easiest bet is that Snowden will likely be extradited (assuming he does not successfully flee Hong Kong as well). But this case is markedly different from previous ones. There is not much "data" for extradition when the offense involves the leaking of classified information. It has certainly occurred in <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/uk-nod-for-ravi-shankarans-extradition/article4760457.ece">other contexts</a>, but is entirely new ground for the U.S.-Hong Kong legal cooperation relationship (I'd love it if anyone could point me to more examples). Snowden may have some basis for challenging a request and extradition proceedings are likely to drag on for some time. Indeed, it's not entirely impossible for Hong Kong to deny extradition, though it would generate significant political friction with the U.S. The legal deck is stacked in the United States' favor, despite the novelty of this case. So be wary of pop-Realist foreign policy commentaries that claim it's <i>all</i>&nbsp;about China - Chinese influence in Hong Kong's affairs is neither infinite, nor cost-free.<br /><br /><i>*Sadly, I don't have a model for making a more precise claim/prediction here, though an interesting project might involve using GDELT to identify successful/failed extradition cases and model P(approval) using a combination of political and legal variables. Certainly more than a blog post can carry.</i>Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-10622565399927797402013-04-18T08:02:00.002-07:002013-04-18T08:03:33.112-07:00Trading with DemocraciesThe topic of international trade has received some heightened attention in the news over the past month. Japan will soon be <a href="http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/04/12/business/japan-u-s-tpp-deal-sets-stage-for-congress-verdict">joining negotiations</a> over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the U.S. and European Union are moving forward with plans for a possible transatlantic FTA.<br /><br />Trade is one of the few international issues that has a significant domestic political dimension. Consider the ongoing political debates over the NAFTA agreement throughout the 1990s or the recent battle over the Korea-U.S. FTA. The distribution of voters' preferences for and against trade influences the extent of trade liberalization.<br /><br />As a result, a number of political scientists studied the question of what determines individuals' preferences toward international trade. Economic self-interest is one intuitive explanation. By the classic Heckscher-Ohlin model of trade, factors that are abundant in a country relative to the rest of the world gain from trade while scarce factors lose out. If we assume that losers from trade will oppose liberalization and winners will support, then we would expect that an individual's factor endowment would be associated with their trade attitudes. The U.S. is relatively abundant in high-skilled labor but relatively scarce in low-skill labor. The theory suggests that, all else equal, high-skilled U.S. workers will be pro-trade while low-skilled workers will oppose barrier reductions. Kenneth Scheve and Matthew Slaughter (2001) found support for this relationship using survey data for the U.S. (<a href="http://notecrom.com/content/files/425/file.pdf">ungated paper</a>). Anna Maria Mayda and Dani Rodrik (2005) provide further evidence from a cross-national dataset of trade attitudes (<a href="http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/economics/pdf/511.pdf">ungated</a>).<br /><br />However, there is also strong evidence that factors beyond both self-interest and economics influence individuals' trade preferences. For example, Edward Mansfield and Diana Mutz (2009) (<a href="https://www.princeton.edu/~pcglobal/conferences/domestic08/papers/Support%20for%20Free%20Trade.pdf">ungated draft</a>) show that support and opposition to trade are influenced more by individuals' perceptions of trade's impact on the overall U.S. economy rather than by how trade affects them <i>personally.</i>&nbsp;Additionally, ethnocentric and isolationist views are strongly connected to hostility toward trade. That is, openness to trade depends on more than individuals perceptions of economic gains and losses; it reflects, in part, their fundamental attitudes towards other nations.<br /><br />My most recent research is motivated by this last question: how do the characteristics of potential trading partners influence support for trade? To date, research on trade preferences has looked at support for trade <i>in general.</i>&nbsp;Given that most trade liberalization in recent years has been conducted through preferential trade agreements (PTAs), trade agreements between specific countries, it is important to also understand support for trade&nbsp;<i>with specific countries</i>. Indeed, empirically, there is some evidence of meaningful variation in support for trade when respondents are asked to consider different countries. A 2008 <a href="http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/files/Studies_Publications/POS/POS2008/Soft_Power_in_Asia.aspx">survey</a> by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs showed that while 59% of American respondents said they would support a trade agreement with Japan, only 41% supported a trade agreement with China.<br /><br />Specifically, I'm interested in the role of trading partner democracy on support for trade. I look at whether Americans prefer to trade with other democracies, how large the effect is compared to other relevant variables, and why democracies are favored. Regime type is a particularly interesting variable since it's associated with patterns of PTA formation at the global level. Empirically, democracies tend to sign significantly more preferential trade agreements with other democracies (Mansfield, Milner and Rosendorff, 2002) (<a href="https://files.nyu.edu/bpr1/public/papers/mmr2io.pdf">ungated</a>). While this research project certainly does not aim to provide an explanation for these macro-level patterns (since diffuse public attitudes are only one of many inputs into trade policy decisions), it does suggest that domestic debates over trade are not simply about the distribution of gains and losses. Trading partners matter.<br /><br />In the vein of forthcoming research by Mike Tomz and Jessica Weeks on the <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~tomz/pubs/TomzWeeks-2013-02.pdf">democratic peace</a>, I use a survey experiment to test whether Americans have a preference for democracies in trade. For my pilot survey, I recruited a sample of U.S.-located respondents through Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. Each respondent was asked to evaluate a set of hypothetical trade agreements. Each question presented the respondents with a brief vignette describing a bilateral trade agreement that would reduce barriers such as tariffs. The vignette provided information on the trading partner's regime type, level of economic development, existing trade with the United States, and number of trade agreements signed with other countries. Additionally, it provided information on estimated job losses/gains from the trade agreement (in agriculture, manufacturing and service sectors), expected welfare gains, and whether the trade agreement contains a labor rights clause. Each piece of information or "attribute" of the agreement was <i>randomly drawn</i> from a set of pre-defined levels (with 2 to 5 levels per attribute). Respondents were then asked whether they thought the United States government should or should not sign the trade agreement and to briefly explain why. The figure below provides an example of such a question (in this case, a rather unfavorable agreement).<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SSiETP0nCXQ/UXAIMBZQutI/AAAAAAAAALk/iiH9Txcsfmc/s1600/sampleQ.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="121" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SSiETP0nCXQ/UXAIMBZQutI/AAAAAAAAALk/iiH9Txcsfmc/s320/sampleQ.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />The survey is a type of experiment known as a "conjoint" design. Conjoint experiments ask individuals ask individuals to evaluate profiles composed of multiple, randomly assigned attributes. Respondents are asked to rate individual profiles (as in this experiment) or choose a preferred profile from a random set (a "choice-based conjoint" design). The advantage of this design is that it allows researchers to efficiently run multiple experiments simultaneously and to test competing hypotheses. For example, Jens Hainmueller and Dan Hopkins have recently used such conjoint experiments to study <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2106116">voter preferences over immigration</a>.<br /><br />My sample contained 363 respondents, each answering 3 questions. Three questions were unanswered by respondents, giving a sample of 1086 approve/disapprove responses. I estimate a binary logistic regression model on the 0-1 outcome variable with all of the attribute levels as dummy variable predictors. The figure below shows the estimated effect of each level on the probability that an individual will support the trade agreement relative to the baseline level (denoted by an asterisk). Lines denote 95% cluster-bootstrapped confidence intervals, clustering on individual. Note that because confidence intervals are bootstrapped rather than computed via normal approximation, they are not necessarily symmetric around the point estimate.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UnaQvdhLMAA/UXAIXC1BlqI/AAAAAAAAALs/z00nj-COZQo/s1600/figure1-marginaleffectplot.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UnaQvdhLMAA/UXAIXC1BlqI/AAAAAAAAALs/z00nj-COZQo/s320/figure1-marginaleffectplot.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />Job gains/losses have the largest effect on approval, which makes sense given that the political debate in the U.S. surrounding trade policy (and foreign economic policy in general) focuses so heavily on prospective employment gains. However, even when accounting for these economic variables, trading partner democracy has a statistically non-zero and rather sizable effect. Democracy increases probability of support by, on average, 9 percentage points, with the simulated 95% confidence interval running from about 4% to 15%. That is, respondents in the sample were 9% more likely to support an agreement with a democracy than with an otherwise equivalent autocracy. This is, interestingly, roughly comparable to the estimated effect of minor job gains/losses. So while trading partner democracy is not voters' overriding concern, it does appear to have a meaningful impact.<br /><br />But the more interesting question is not whether voters prefer democracies, but why. Do voters use democracy as a signal or "heuristic" to infer other favorable characteristics about a trading partner, or is the observed preference simply a taste for other, similar, states? How much of the effect of democracy is transmitted through some mediating variable? I posit three possible mediators for which democracy serves as a proxy - democracies are perceived as trustworthy or "fair" trading partners, democracies are perceived as politically closer to the United States, and democracies are perceived as respectful of citizens' rights. To estimate these mediator effects, I use a <a href="http://imai.princeton.edu/research/files/Design.pd">"crossover" experimental design </a>suggested by Kosuke Imai, Dustin Tingley and Teppei Yamamoto (2013). For each of the first three questions (used in estimating the main effects above), I measure the value of one of the mediator variables in addition to the outcome. The figure below shows the estimated effect of democracy on each of the mediators. Democracies are perceived as less likely to engage in unfair trading practices, more likely to have friendly relations with the U.S. and more likely to respect their citizens' rights.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5QzF5A50vDk/UXAI3PZObwI/AAAAAAAAAL0/1FkkldKyQSc/s1600/figure2-effectonmediators.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="114" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5QzF5A50vDk/UXAI3PZObwI/AAAAAAAAAL0/1FkkldKyQSc/s320/figure2-effectonmediators.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />After a brief break, respondents are then asked to evaluate three more trade agreements. The second set of profiles is identical to the first in all respects except that the regime type variable is assigned the opposite value. So if the first question asked about a democracy, the fourth will ask about an autocracy. In addition, I "force" the value of one of the mediators to take on the value measured in the first experiment. For example, if the respondent says that they believe the democracy in the first experiment is a trustworthy and fair trader, they are told, as part of the profile in the fourth experiment, that "experts say this country does not engage in unfair trading practices." This design allows me to identify how much of the effect of democracy can be explained by one of these mediator variables. That is, it identifies the counterfactual level of support for an autocracy when the mediator is held at the value for a democracy and vice-versa. The <i>mediator effect</i> is the effect of a change in the mediator variable from the level measured under autocracy to the level measured under democracy.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xUhKWAFkcMA/UXAI9_jIPKI/AAAAAAAAAL8/OAfNrY_-fwI/s1600/figure3-indirecteffects.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="182" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xUhKWAFkcMA/UXAI9_jIPKI/AAAAAAAAAL8/OAfNrY_-fwI/s320/figure3-indirecteffects.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />The figure above shows the estimates and bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals for these mediator effects. I use logit regression to control for the other attributes since there is likely some imbalance due to smaller sample size and imperfect randomization. There are two mediation effects for each mediating variable - one when the "treatment" is held at democracy and one when it is held at autocracy. A significant difference in mediator effects suggests a possible interaction between the treatment and mediator. That is, the effect of a variable like perceived trade fairness differs when the country in question is a democracy rather than an autocracy.<br /><br />Indeed, this appears to be the case for some of the mediators. While the estimated mediator effect of trade fairness for democracy is positive and statistically significant at the .05 level, the estimated effect appears to be negative for autocracy, although the 95% confidence band crosses 0. Democracies that are perceived as "unfair" trading partners receive a penalty support, but autocracies do not receive a corresponding "boost" for being trustworthy. That the estimate for autocracies is so negative may just be a function of sampling variability, but it may also hint at possible violations of mediator identification assumptions or profile order effects. These are issues I'll try to address in the next iteration of the experiment.<br /><br />The most interesting mediator effect appears to be political affinity with the United States. Democracies who have unfriendly relations with the U.S. receive a statistically significant penalty to support while friendly autocracies receive a boost. It's difficult to infer the exact magnitude of the relations bonus since the precision of these estimates is much lower since each respondent only answered one question for each mediator. That is, it's still unclear whether friendly autocracies are, on average, equivalent to democracies as far as voters' trade attitudes are concerned. But the evidence is suggestive that some portion of the estimated democracy effect is transmitted through perceptions of political proximity with the United States. Democracy functions as a heuristic for "ally."<br /><br />Surprisingly, human rights issues, despite their prominence in domestic trade debates, don't seem to influence voters' trade preferences on average. Neither the presence of a labor rights clause nor perceptions of the human rights record of a trading partner have a statistically discernible effect on the probability of support. It may be that labor rights clauses are not perceived as credible constraints, or that rights concerns are important to specific constituencies. The effect may be&nbsp;<i>heterogeneous </i>and averaging across the full sample misses interesting cross-individual differences.<br /><br />This is of course all very preliminary research so none of the results should be taken as anything more than suggestive. The sample from Mechanical Turk is not perfectly representative of the U.S. population (MTurk samples tend to skew younger and more liberal). While research <a href="http://pan.oxfordjournals.org/content/20/3/351.short">suggests</a> that experimental effects estimated on MTurk samples tend to be comparable to effects estimated on nationally representative samples, a better (and larger) sample would be preferred. Indeed, the preliminary results do not have much power in estimating the mediation effects - the confidence bounds are large for all of the estimates. In future revisions of this design, I will likely test the mediation effects jointly (as Tomz and Weeks do for the democratic peace) rather than separately. Additionally, other trading partner characteristics omitted from the descriptions might have even larger effects when included in the profiles. I certainly welcome any suggestions for improving the design.<br /><br />The preliminary evidence suggests that the type of trading partner matters for domestic debates over liberalization. In my sample, I estimate that trade agreements with democracies receive approximately a 9 +/- 5 % boost in support compared to otherwise comparable agreements with non-democracies. Furthermore, I find that some of the effect of democracy is transmitted through perceptions that democracies are more trustworthy trading partners and more likely to have close relations with the United States. Regime type functions partly as a heuristic for inferring other traits about a prospective trading partner. I certainly cannot make specific statements about how these preferences translate into government actions, but the results do imply that democratic governments (or at least the United States government) is not only constrained by the distributional economic consequences of trade, but also by the characteristics of prospective trading partners.Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-76804057714635483682013-02-17T19:21:00.000-08:002013-02-17T19:35:18.835-08:00Is "skin in the game" the only way to solve principal-agent problems?Constantine Sandis and Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently invited comments on a <a href="http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SandisTaleb.pdf">working paper</a> titled "Ethics and Asymmetry: Skin in the Game as a Required Heuristic for Acting Under Uncertainty." This opened up a rather heated discussion on Twitter, so I felt it might be useful to comment in longer-form. And while not articulated explicitly as such, it discusses an issue important to many political economists - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_agent_problem">the principal-agent problem.</a><br /><br />From the abstract:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">We propose a global and mandatory heuristic that anyone involved in an action that can possibly generate harm for others, even probabilistically, should be required to be exposed to some damage, regardless of context. We link the rule to various philosophical approaches to ethics and moral luck.</blockquote><div><div>This heuristic is, bluntly speaking, the mandate that actors have "skin in the game."<br /><br />Reading the paper, I was reminded of a classic scene in the last episode of Joss Whedon's Firefly, "<a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/4479#i0,p9,d0">Objects in Space</a>," where the philosophical bounty hunter Jubal Early converses with his hostage, doctor Simon Tam, about the merits of experience in expert decision-making.</div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><blockquote class="tr_bq">Jubal Early: You ever been shot?&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Simon: No.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Jubal Early: You oughta be shot. Or stabbed, lose a leg. To be a surgeon, you know? Know what kind of pain you're dealing with. They make psychiatrists get psychoanalyzed before they can get certified, but they don't make a surgeon get cut on. That seem right to you?&nbsp;</blockquote></blockquote><div>Individuals who act for others should be exposed to the same risks. Bankers who manage others' money should know the pain of loss. Politicians who fail to act on behalf of their constituents should be voted out of office. Only when the agent and the principal share the same preferences is timeless principal-agent problem solved.<br /><br />Although a bit simplified, this is the overarching idea that I took from the paper.</div><div><br /></div><div>I think the article obfuscates a pretty basic concept with a great deal of unrelated discussion of ethics, axiology and morality. Not to say that these are not worth considering, but the core problem that Sandis and Taleb identify is a practical one: when people are tasked with making decisions that have repercussions for others, how do we ensure that they make "good" decisions on behalf of those that they affect? Additionally, how do we limit agents' ability to enrich themselves at the expense of their principal(s)?</div><div><br /></div><div>Sandis and Taleb's argument is uncompromising, which perhaps makes it more appealing as an ethical claim than as a practical one. By arguing that agents are only justified in acting on behalf of principles when they have "skin-in-the-game," they have assumed away the entire principal-agent problem. If the agent has the exact same preferences as the principal (i.e. they are exposed to the same risks), then there is no problem. The agent will always behave in the manner that the principal prescribes.<br /><br />This is a nice thought exercise, but agents <i>almost never </i>have preferences identical to their principals. They are rarely exposed to identical risks. So "skin-in-the-game" ends up as a kind of aspirational goal for how principal-agent relations should be managed. Even then, Sandis and Taleb's discussion is still much too simple to be of practical value. According to the paper's logic, the best policy is the one that alters the agent's incentives such that they become aligned with those of the principal.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>This is obvious.</div><div><br /></div><div>But yet again, there would be no principal-agent problem if the principal always had the means to perfectly discipline the agent.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>In the real world, agents rarely share the same preferences as their principals and principals are almost never in perfect control of their agents. Power is shared and relationships are tense. Yet delegation is a necessary aspect of nearly all human institutions.</div><div><br /></div><div>Moreover, there is rarely a single principal. Agents face conflicting pressures from a myriad of sources. Politicians do not respond to a unified "constituency" but to a diverse array of "constituents." So when Sandis and Taleb argue that decision-makers need "skin-in-the-game," they raise the question of "whose game are we talking about?"&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>The paper provides a first-best solution to the principal-agent problem, one where the agent is fully attuned to the risks suffered by the principal. But there are costs to such a solution. Depending on the viability of a "skin in the game" solution, a second-best approach may be more desirable. "Skin in the game" is certainly neither global nor mandatory.</div><div><br /></div><div>Take one example in the paper</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">The ancients were fully aware of this incentive to hide risks, and implemented very simple but potent heuristics (for the effectiveness and applicability of fast and frugal heuristics, see Gigerenzer, 2010). About 3,800 years ago, Hammurabi’s code specified that if a builder builds a house and the house collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death. This is the best risk-management rule ever. The ancients understood that the builder will always know more about the risks than the client, and can hide sources of fragility and improve his profitability by cutting corners. The foundation is the best place to hide such things. The builder can also fool the inspector, for the person hiding risk has a large informational advantage over the one who has to find it. The same absence of personal risk is what motivates people to only appear to be doing good, rather than to actually do it.</blockquote><div>As a risk management rule, Hammurabi's code ensures that builders suffer the same costs as the owners. However, it also probably ensures an under-provision of houses. Suppose that even a house built by an expert builder has some risk of collapsing despite the builder's best efforts. Knowing this, a builder suffers an additional lifetime cost of possible death every time he/she constructs a house. If the builder places some non-zero value on his life, he/she will choose to constrain the amount of houses that he builds even if there is demand for more. In economic terms, the death risk is an additional "cost" to production.<br /><br />Now, if the builder valued the life of an owner to the same extent as his/her own life, then the law would simply enforce an already incentive-compatible relationship - there would be no need to force the builder to have "skin in the game," it already would be. But this is almost never the case for obvious reasons. Indeed, the reason why we care about institutions is that rarely do individuals have incentives aligned with what is "optimal" behavior.<br /><br />But institutional designs impose costs of their own.<br /><br />The point of this stylized example is that there are constraints in every principal-agent relationship. How do we weigh the benefit of fewer deaths from shoddy houses against the costs of an under-supply of houses? Should we tolerate some shirking on the part of builders if there is an imminent need for more houses? Sandis and Taleb's heuristic gives no answers.<br /><br />Moreover, even if "skin in the game" is a "first-best" solution to controlling agent behavior, it is not a necessary condition.<br /><br />In Sandis and Taleb's article, "bad luck" plays a crucial role in justifying their heuristic. But "bad luck" creates its own issues that make perfect enforcement inexorably costly. To get an agent's "skin in the game," the principal needs to be able to punish the agent for bad behavior. But rarely is behavior observed. Rather, it is some outcome on which the principal conditions their punishment. The outcome is to some extent a function of the agent's effort, but it's also subject to unknown randomness. In the builder example, the probability that a building will fail is related to the builder's effort, but it is not inconceivable that an expertly constructed structure might collapse.<br /><br />Principals get noisy signals of agent behavior. It is unclear whether an outcome is the result of poor decision-making or bad luck. This distinction may or may not matter, depending on the case. However, in many instances where it is difficult to observe the agent's behavior, the optimal solution to the principal-agent problem still leaves the agent somewhat insulated from the costs of their actions.<br /><br />Consider a political example, the relationship between a government (agent) and the citizens (principal) of a country.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">This example draws on an extensive body of game theoretic work by Ferejohn, Barro, Acemoglu, Robinson, Przeworski and recently Fearon (among many, many others). It is very much a simplification.</span><br /><br />The citizens, if collectively powerful enough, can overthrow a government that does not behave in a manner that reflects their interests. Assuming that they are perfectly able to see what the government does, they will always overthrow a government that deviates from their desires. The government, knowing this, and preferring not to get overthrown, will comply perfectly with the wishes of the citizens. The government's "skin is in the game" in that the government faces costs (rebellion) concurrently with the citizens (reduced welfare from government shirking).<br /><br />But typically, citizens cannot perfectly observe government action. The relationship between policy and outcome is complex, particularly in the economic realm. Citizens only observe their and their comrades' welfare, which is a function of both government policy and unforeseen events (like a war in a neighboring country that leads to reduced export revenue). More generally, citizens are unsure how much to blame government action for their current predicament.<br /><br />If they adopt the same rule as in the perfect observation case - overthrow the government if we observe outcomes different from our ideal outcome - then they are likely to overthrow governments that did nothing wrong, a costly scenario.<br /><br />Citizens may therefore tolerate some deviation from perfection, that is, weaken the amount to which the government has "skin in the game," based on the fact that they can't perfectly observe the government's behavior. &nbsp;Rejection becomes a question of expectation - small deviations from perfection might just be bad luck, but a massive downturn in welfare can likely be blamed on government incompetence.<br /><br />Indeed, having too rigid of an "overthrow rule" may even lead to perverse outcomes. Suppose a government knows that, no matter what it does, it is going to be blamed for an economic downturn beyond its control. It now has strong incentives to ignore the will of the public and be as predatory as possible, knowing that it has no hope of appeasing the public either way. These sorts of twisted incentives are at the heart of much game theoretic work on democratization and why leaders choose to give up power.<br /><br />Is it worth putting the agent's "skin in the game" if that leads the agent toward predatory behavior?<br /><br />Returning to the example of ancient Babylon, instead of killing builders of failed houses and running the risk that some good builders will get killed by accident, Hammurabi could have developed building codes. This is different from a "skin the game" solution. The builder's "skin" is no longer in the "game" since he/she does not suffer any costs after the house is built. However, failing to build to code is a clear and observable signal that the builder is shirking their responsibilities. The builder still has more private knowledge and can cut corners, but only within limits. Clear deviations from the code get punished. Some non-compliance is tolerated in order to avoid mistaken executions.<br /><br />What Sandis and Taleb miss in their brief discussion is that there is a continuum of possible mechanisms for controlling an agent's behavior - "skin in the game" is one extreme, but there are other viable solutions depending on the context.<br /><br />Importantly, there are&nbsp;<i>trade-offs.</i>&nbsp;Conditional on some level of imperfect observation of the agent's behavior (which is made smaller by increasing quality of monitoring), the principal must weigh the benefits of tight control over the agent's behavior against the costs of punishing a "good" agent. If standards are high, the principal might accidentally punish an compliant agent. If standards are low, the "false positive" risk drops, but the incentive to shirk rises. Sandis and Taleb's argument provides no method of resolving this question.<br /><br />Moreover, there are a myriad of cases where a principal actually <b><u>benefits</u></b> by delegating decisions to an agent who is somewhat insulated from the costs facing the principal. This is often labeled dynamic or time-inconsistent preference problem. Governments often find it in their best long-term interests to delegate decision-making to someone who has absolutely no "skin in the game." International courts are a great example of this, as are domestic courts (imagine the prospects for civil rights in 1960s America if Supreme Court judges faced periodic elections).<br /><br /></div><div>My ultimate issue with the paper is that it simply lacks sufficient nuance to be useful or informative. By focusing on what should be the ideal-typical relationship between principal and agent, it ignores the trade-offs that plague real world principal-agent problems. Either "skin in the game" is such a broad standard that it is absolutely meaningless, or it represents a specific solution to principal-agent problems, namely subjecting the agent and principal to identical rewards/punishments, that is neither feasible nor, in many instances, desirable.</div></div>Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-40534273921651500042013-01-31T05:53:00.000-08:002013-01-31T13:55:49.665-08:00Why Inference Matters<script type="text/x-mathjax-config">MathJax.Hub.Config({ tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]} }); </script><script src="http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=default" type="text/javascript"></script>This is a post inspired by a recent exchange on twitter between myself and friend, colleague, and TNR writer <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/authors/nate-cohn">Nate Cohn</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/electionate">@electionate</a>). The initial exchange was pretty superfluous, but it got me thinking about a broader question how writers about politics should approach quantitative data. That spiraled into this rather long-winded post. Indeed, the original conversation gets lost, but I think a more important broader point gets made. As political journalists and analysts incorporate more data into their writing, they would benefit by thinking in terms of statistical inference. It's just not possible to meaningfully talk about "real-world" data - electoral, or otherwise - without also talking about probability.<br /><br />First, a quick summary of the discussion that led me to write this: Gary King tweeted a link to<a href="http://www.acthomas.ca/comment/2013/01/the-statistical-properties-of-the-electoral-college-are-perfectly-bearable.html"> this post&nbsp;</a>by Andrew C. Thomas covering a paper written by himself, King, Andrew Gelman and Jonathan Katz that examined "bias" in the Electoral College system. The authors found that despite the winner-take-all allocation of votes, there was no statistically significant evidence of bias in recent election years. Essentially, they modeled the vote share of each candidate at the district level and estimated the Electoral College results for a hypothetical election where the popular vote was tied. Andrew made a <a href="http://www.acthomas.ca/comment/assets_c/2013/01/1-pbplot-11.html">graph </a>of their "bias" estimates - all of the 95% confidence intervals in recent years contain 0.<br /><br />Nate shot back a quick tweet response asking why the results suggest no bias in 2012 when the electorally "decisive" states were 1.6 percentage points more democratic than the national popular vote.<br /><br />This led to a longer and rather interesting discussion between Nate and myself on how to evaluate Electoral College bias (for what it's worth, my twitter arguments were pretty bad). Nate made some good points about <a href="https://twitter.com/electionate/status/296359259757744128">differences</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/electionate/status/296361938328358912">in</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/electionate/status/296362005495943168">Obama's</a> margin-of-victory in the states needed to win the Electoral College versus his overall popular vote margin-of-victory. He notes that Obama won the states needed to reach 272 by a minimum of 5.4% while his popular vote margin was only 3.9%. If the existence of the Electoral College exaggerated Obama's vote advantage relative to a popular vote system, then it's possible to conclude that the college was "biased" in Obama's favor.<br /><br />Nate has since turned this into part of an&nbsp;<a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112270/abolishing-electoral-college-would-benefit-republcans">article</a>, arguing:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The easiest way to judge the Democrats’ newfound Electoral College advantage is by comparing individual states to the popular vote. Last November, Obama won states worth 285 electoral votes by a larger margin than the country as a whole, suggesting that Obama would have had the advantage if the popular vote were tied. But the current system appears even more troubling for Republicans when you consider the wide gap between the “tipping point” state and the national popular vote. Obama’s 270th electoral vote came from Colorado, which voted for the president by nearly 5.4 points—almost 1.8 points more than his popular vote victory. Simply put, the GOP is probably better off trying to win the national popular vote the state contests in Pennsylvania or Colorado, since the national popular vote was much closer in 2012 than the vote in those tipping point states. Obama enjoyed a similar Electoral College advantage in 2008.&nbsp;</blockquote>Here the wording is slightly different - the term is Electoral College "advantage" rather than Electoral College "bias," but the argument is essentially the same - currently the electoral geographic landscape is such that the Democrats benefit disproportionately - a shift to a popular vote system would help the Republicans.<br /><br />The argument is interesting (and could in fact be true), but the evidence presented doesn't really say anything. The <b>big problem&nbsp;</b>is that it <b>ignores probability.</b>&nbsp;You can't make a credible argument about the "nature" of an election cycle just by comparing election results data points <b>without a discussion of uncertainty in the data</b>. The results of an election <i>are not the election itself </i>- they are data. The data are what we use to make <b>inferences </b>about certain aspects of one election (or many elections). This distinction is essential. We don't observe whether the Democrats have an Electoral College advantage in 2012 or whether Colorado was more favorable to the Democrats than Virginia or Ohio. We can't observe these things because all we have are the output - the results.<br /><br />Studying elections is like standing outside an automotive plant and watching cars roll off the assembly line. &nbsp;We never get to see how the car is put together; we only see the final product.<br /><br />If we knew exactly what went into the final vote tally - that is, if we were the plant managers and not just passive observers - then we wouldn't need statistics. But reality is complicated and we're not omniscient. This is what makes statistical inference so valuable - it lets us quantify our uncertainty about complex processes.<br /><br />Just for curiosity, I decided to <a href="http://uselectionatlas.org/">grab the 2012 election data</a> to take a closer look at Nate's argument. I estimated the number of electoral votes that each candidate would receive for a given share of the two-party popular vote. I altered the state-level vote shares assuming a uniform swing - each state was shifted by the difference between the "true" and "hypothesized" popular vote - and computed the corresponding "electoral vote" that the candidate would receive. For time/simplicity, I ignored the Maine/Nebraska allocation rules (including them doesn't affect the conclusions).<br /><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">To clarify, I measure the Democratic candidate's share of the <b>two-party vote</b>&nbsp;as opposed to share of the <b>total vote</b>. That is, %Dem/(%Dem + %Rep). This measure is common in the political science literature on elections and allows us to make better comparisons by accounting for uneven variations in the third-party vote.&nbsp;</span><br /><br />Here's what the 2012 election looks like for President Obama. The dotted vertical line represents the observed vote total, the blue line marks the "tie" point and the horizontal red line represents 270 electoral votes. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dLmB6SIh5RQ/UQnzIq7Eo1I/AAAAAAAAAKM/nT74yFRlsrA/s1600/obama_2012.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dLmB6SIh5RQ/UQnzIq7Eo1I/AAAAAAAAAKM/nT74yFRlsrA/s200/obama_2012.png" width="200" /></a></div><br /><br />This is consistent with Nate's argument. There is a space of potential popular vote outcomes where Obama loses the two-party vote but still wins the Electoral College - the "272" firewall.<br /><br />How about 2008?<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XPfX2ZqRaWQ/UQnzIUSfXtI/AAAAAAAAAKI/HThRxggzqhY/s1600/Obama_2008.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XPfX2ZqRaWQ/UQnzIUSfXtI/AAAAAAAAAKI/HThRxggzqhY/s200/Obama_2008.png" width="200" /></a></div><br />Same thing - about a 1 percentage point loss of the popular vote would have still mean an Electoral College victory for Barack Obama - again Colorado is key here. Indeed, the advantage appears to be even larger here than in 2012.<br /><br />2004?<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZY0UEeR_-BU/UQnzHr-0vkI/AAAAAAAAAKE/x31s_gYv6kw/s1600/Kerry_2004.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZY0UEeR_-BU/UQnzHr-0vkI/AAAAAAAAAKE/x31s_gYv6kw/s200/Kerry_2004.png" width="200" /></a></div>Here the advantage is less perceptible - barely a fifth of a percentage point. Compared to 2008 and 2012, this would suggest a "trend" towards greater pro-Democratic bias in the Electoral College<br /><br />2000?<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XHmxrzOzpFY/UQnzHrJN8_I/AAAAAAAAAJ8/PP8f127FziQ/s1600/Gore_2000.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XHmxrzOzpFY/UQnzHrJN8_I/AAAAAAAAAJ8/PP8f127FziQ/s200/Gore_2000.png" width="200" /></a></div><br />Bush obviously has the advantage here (and as we know, he lost the popular vote)<br /><br />How about jumping to 1992?<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-j64Ty1yRjH0/UQnzHgNlqQI/AAAAAAAAAKA/pHq0Dh-0QsI/s1600/Clinton_1992.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-j64Ty1yRjH0/UQnzHgNlqQI/AAAAAAAAAKA/pHq0Dh-0QsI/s200/Clinton_1992.png" width="200" /></a></div><br />Again the elder Bush has a slight advantage.<br /><br />I could keep going. One could infer a story of a growing democratic advantage in the Electoral College from these five data points - it's there in the most recent two cycles and it wasn't there before. But in the end,&nbsp;<b>these graphs are not at all meaningful</b>.<br /><br />The problem with what I've done above is that it's at best a convoluted summary of the data - the implied inferences about "advantage" are absurd absent a discussion of probability. Consider the assumptions behind the argument. It implicitly assumes that if we re-ran the 2012 election from the beginning, we would get the exact same results. It follows that if we re-ran the election and posited that Pres. Obama received only 50% or 49% of the two-party vote, then the results in each state would shift <b>exactly </b>by 1-2%.<br /><br />Of course this is crazy. We easily observe that from year to year, changes in two-party vote shares are not constant across all states (this is why the uniform swing assumption is a <b>statistical&nbsp;modeling assumption</b>&nbsp;and not a statement of fact). Without probability our counterfactual observations of the electoral vote are nonsense, since we implicitly assume that there is zero variation in the vote share. This is certainly not the case. If we could hypothetically re-run the election, we would not expect the vote share to be exactly the same. There are a host of elements, from the campaign to the weather on election day, that could shift the results. We would expect them to be close, but we are inherently uncertain about any counterfactual scenario.<br /><br />However, we cannot reason about the 2012 election without considering counterfactuals - what would the result have been had A happened instead of B. The problem is that we only get to observe the election once - we have to estimate the counterfactual, and all estimates are uncertain.<br /><br />This is where thinking in terms of inference becomes useful. Political analysts want to move beyond summarizing the data (election returns) and make some meaningful explanatory argument about the election itself. It's difficult to do this in a quantitative sense without accounting for uncertainty in the counterfactuals.<br /><br />Here is one way of evaluating Nate's argument using the same election result data that incorporates probability. It's very much constrained by the data, but that's kind of the point - looking just at a couple of election results doesn't tell us much.<br /><br />The core question is: could the vote share gap that Nate identifies be due to chance?<br /><br />Let's imagine that the Democratic party candidate's two-party vote share in any given state is modeled by the following process<br /><br />$$v_i = \mu + \delta_i + \epsilon_i$$<br /><br />$v_i$ represents the two-party vote share in state $i$ received by the Democratic party candidate. $\mu$ is the 'fixed' "national" component of the vote - the component of the vote accounted for by national-level factors like economic growth. It does not vary from state-to-state. $\delta_i$ is the 'fixed' state component of the vote share - it reflects the static attributes of the state like demographics. For a state like California, it would be positive. For Wyoming, negative. This is the attribute that we're interested in. In particular, can we say with confidence from the evidence that Colorado, Obama's "firewall" state, structurally favors the Democrats more than a state like Virginia where the President's electoral performance roughly matched the popular vote? Or, is the gap that we observe attributable to random variation.<br /><br />That's where $\epsilon_i$ comes in. $\epsilon_i$ represents the component of error that's not unique to the election year. That is, if we were to re-run the election, the differences in the observed $v_i$ will be a function of $\epsilon_i$ taking on a different value. This represents the "idiosyncracies" of the election - weather, turnout, etc... $\epsilon_i$ is what introduces probability into the analysis.<br /><br />For the sake of the model, we assume that $\epsilon_i$ is distributed normally with mean $0$ and variance $\sigma_i^2$. I'll allow each $\sigma_i$ to be different - that is, some states might exhibit more random variation than others.<br /><br />Normally the analyst would then estimate the parameters of the model. However, I have neither the data nor the time to gather it (if you're interested in data, see the <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2134776">Gelman et. al. paper</a>). My goal with this toy example is to show that the observed difference in the 2012 vote share between the "270th" state, Colorado, and a comparable state like Virginia, which has mirrored the popular vote share, might be reasonably attributed to random fluctuations within each state. To do so, I generate rough estimates of some parameters while making sensible assumptions about others.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: xx-small;">As an aside, I could also have done a comparison between Colorado and a national popular vote statistic. However, since I'm only working with vote shares, I would have to make even more assumptions about the distribution of voters across states in order to correctly weight the national vote. Additionally, I would have to make even more assumptions about the data generating process in the other 48 states + D.C. This approach is a bit easier and demonstrates the same point.</span><br /><br />I assume that $\mu$ is equal to President Obama's share of the two-party vote in 2012. The estimate of $\mu$ itself is irrelevant, since we're interested in differences in $\delta_i$ between Colorado and a comparable state (the $\mu$s cancel). But for the sake of the model it's helpful since it allows me to use $0$ as a reasonable "null" estimate of $v_i$.<br /><br />The question is whether Colorado's $\sigma$ is statistically different from that of Virginia. If it is, then it might make sense to talk about an electoral "advantage" in 2012. Obviously this assumes that the $\sigma$ values for all of the other states in the 272 elector coalition are at least as large as Colorado's, which I'll grant is true for the sake of the model (it only works against me). Colorado is the "weakest link."<br /><br />The way to answer this question is to test the null hypothesis of no difference. Suppose that $\delta_i$ equals $0$ for Virginia and Colorado - that there is no substantive difference between Virginia (the baseline state) and Colorado (the "firewall" state). What's the probability that we would observe a gap of $.7\%$ between their state-level electoral results?<br /><br />Estimating the probability requires making a reasonable estimate for the variance of $\epsilon_i$. How much variation in the electoral results can we attribute to random error and how much can we attribute to substantive features of the electoral map.<br /><br />Unfortunately, we can't re-play the 2012 election, so we have to look at history to calculate variance - in this case the 2008 election. As Nate notes in the post, the party coalitions are relatively stable and demographic changes/realignments typically take many election cycles to complete. As such, we may be able to assume that the state-level "structural" effects are the same in 2012 as they are in 2008. That is, the variation in the popular-vote - state-level vote from year-to-year can be used to estimate the variance of the error terms $\epsilon_{CO}$ and $\epsilon_{VA}$.<br /><br />But it's hard to get a good estimate of a variance with only two data points. Four is slightly better, but to do so we have to assume that the error terms of Colorado and Virginia's vote shares are identically distributed - that &nbsp;$\sigma_{CO}^2 = \sigma_{VA}^2$. That's not to say that the observed "error" values are the same, just that they're drawn from the same distribution. Is this a reasonable assumption? The residuals don't appear to be dramatically different, but we just don't know - again, another statistical trade-off. Ultimately the point of this exercise is to demonstrate how one-election-cycle observations can be reasonably explained by random variation, so the aim is plausibility versus absolute precision.<br /><br />So I estimate the pooled error variance for each state as the sample variance of the 2008 and 2012 democratic two-party share in each state subtracted from the two-party share of the popular vote. In theory, we could add more electoral cycles to the estimate, but the assumption that $\sigma_i$ does not change from year to year becomes weaker. If I restrict myself to just looking at electoral results, then I have to accept data limitations. This is a general problem with any statistical study of elections - if we look only at percentage aggregates at high levels,<a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/04/02/the-pro-bowl-of-political-science/"> there just isn't a lot of data to work with</a>.<br /><br />The next step is simulation. Suppose we repeated the 2012 election a large number of times on the basis of this model. How often would we see a gap of at least .78% between the vote shares in Colorado and<br />Virginia? The histogram below plots the simulated distribution of that difference. The x-axis gives the percentage differences .01 = 1%). The red dotted line represents a difference of .78 percentage points. Also relevant is the blue dotted line, which represents a difference of -.78 percentage points (Virginia's vote share is greater than Colorado's).<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uOlFpF3r-gI/UQn4H7Ly0_I/AAAAAAAAAKs/VBGBTR1qODE/s1600/simulation_results.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uOlFpF3r-gI/UQn4H7Ly0_I/AAAAAAAAAKs/VBGBTR1qODE/s320/simulation_results.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />What's the probability of seeing a difference as extreme as the gap seen in 2012? Turns out, it's about 40% - certainly not incredibly high, but also not unlikely.<br /><br />Suppose we only care about positive differences, that is, we are absolutely sure that it's impossible for Virginia to be structurally more favorable to the Democrats than Colorado. There is either no difference or $\delta_{CO} &gt; \delta_{VA}$. What's the probability of seeing a difference equal to or greater than .78 percentage points? Well, it's still roughly 20%. Statisticians (as a norm, not as a hard rule) tend to use 5% as the cut-off for rejecting the "null hypothesis" and accepting that there is likely some underlying difference in the parameters not attributable to random variation - in this case, we fail to reject.<br /><br />If the error variance were smaller, that is, if the amount of year-to-year variation that can be ascribed to randomness were lowered, it's possible that a gap of .78% would be surprising. This would lead us to conclude that there indeed may be a structural difference - that Colorado is more advantageous to the Democratic candidate relative to the baseline. The details of the model parameters are really not the point of this exercise. Any estimate of the variance from the sparse data used here is not very reliable. The fact that we are using two elections where the same candidate stood for office suggests non-independence and error correlation which would likely downwardly bias our variance estimates. We could look at the gap in 2008 - two observations are better than one, but in that case, why not include the whole of electoral history - the data exist. Moreover, to make our counterfactual predictions more precise, we need some covariates - independent variables that are good predictors of vote share. In short, we need real statistical models.<br /><br />This is what the Gelman et. al. <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2134776">paper does</a>. While a quick comparison of the data points hints at a structural bias in 2012, a more in-depth modeling approach suggests that difference is not <i>statistically significant</i>. That is, it's likely that any apparent structural advantage in the Electoral College in 2012 is nothing more than noise.<br /><br />The problem with Nate's argument, ultimately, is that it posits a counterfactual (Romney winning the popular vote by a slight margin) without describing the uncertainty around that counterfactual. Without talking about uncertainty, it is impossible to discern whether the observed phenomenon is a result of chance or something substantively interesting.<br /><br />It does appear that I'm spending a lot of time dissecting a rather trivial point, which is true. My goal in this post was not to focus on whether or not the "Electoral College advantage" is true or not - the 2012/2008 election results alone aren't enough data to make that determination.&nbsp;Rather, I wanted to walk through a simple example of inference to demonstrate why it's important to pay attention to probability and randomness when talking about data - to think about data in a statistical manner.<br /><br />We cannot, just by looking at a set of data points, immediately explain which differences are due to structural factors and which ones are due to randomness. No matter what, we make assumptions to draw inferences about the underlying structure. Ignoring randomness doesn't make it go away - it just means making extremely tenuous assumptions about the data (namely, <u>zero variance</u>).<br /><br /><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4764354931517518128" name="conclusion"></a>To summarize, if you get anything out of this post, it should be these three points<br />1) The data are not the parameters (the things we're interested in).<br />2) To infer the parameters from the data, you need to think about probability<br />3) Statistical models are a helpful way of understanding the uncertainty inherent in the data.<br /><br />I'm not suggesting that political writers need to become statisticians. Journalism isn't academia. It doesn't have the luxury of time spent carefully analyzing the data. I'm not expecting to see regressions in every blog post I read, nor do I want to. The Atlantic, WaPo, TNR, NYT are neither Political Analysis nor the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society.<br /><br />But conversely, if there is increasingly a demand for "quantitative" or "numbers-oriented" analysis of political events, then writers should make some effort to use those numbers correctly. At the very least, it's valuable to think of any empirical claim - whether retrospective or predictive - in terms of inference. We have things we know and we want to make arguments about things we don't know or cannot observe. At it's core, argumentation is about reasoning from counterfactuals and counterfactuals always carry uncertainty with them.<br /><br />Even if the goal is just to describe one election cycle, one cannot get very far just comparing electoral returns at various levels of geographic aggregation. Again, election returns are <u>just</u>&nbsp;data - using them to make substantive statements, even if it's only about a single election, relies on <u>implicit</u>&nbsp;inferences which typically ignore the role of uncertainty. And if we want to go beyond just describing an election and identifying trends or features of the electoral landscape, quantitative "inference" without probability is just dart-throwing.<br /><br />Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-28434815928293167562013-01-23T14:38:00.000-08:002013-01-23T19:19:51.866-08:00Public Opposition to Drones in Pakistan - A Question of WordingProfessors C. Christine Fair, Karl Kaltenthaler, and William J. Miller have a <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/you-say-pakistanis-all-hate-the-drone-war-prove-it/267447/">new article </a>in the Atlantic on public attitudes toward U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan. The piece is a shortened version of a longer <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2193354">working paper</a> that looks at the factors affecting knowledge of and opposition to the drone program among Pakistanis. They argue that Pakistani citizens are not as universally opposed to the drone program as is commonly believed and that public opinion is fragmented. According to Pew Research, only a slim majority report that they know anything about the drone program, and of those who do know "a lot" or "a little," only 44% say that they oppose the attacks.<br /><br />Fair, Kaltenthaler and Miller valuably point out that Pakistani attitudes are not homogeneous and that only a minority of Pakistanis even know about the drone program. Making broad and sweeping claims about Pakistani opinion on the drone program is difficult because the average citizen tends to know little about foreign policy issues (this is just as true in <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B58Cgv2amVNcdlZlRUZsV3ZXM0E/edit">the United States</a> as it is in Pakistan)<br /><br />However, I think Fair, Kaltenthaler and Miller may be going too far in asserting that "the conventional wisdom is wrong." Their argument that only 44% of Pakistanis oppose the drone program is highly sensitive to the choice of survey question. While Pew asks a series of questions on attitudes toward drones, Fair et. al. choose to focus on only one of these questions. In doing so, they place a lot of faith in the reliability of that question as an indicator of respondents' opposition to the drone program. This is a persistent issue in all forms of survey research. Scholars are interested in some unobservable quantity (public opinion) and have to use proxies (survey responses) to infer what cannot be directly seen. They must assume that their proxy is a good one.<br /><br />Looking at the other survey questions suggests that this faith may be misplaced. <a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/question-search/?qid=477&amp;cntIDs=&amp;stdIDs=">Although only 44% of respondents</a> say that they "oppose" drone attacks, 74% of respondents think that the drone attacks are "very bad" and<a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/question-search/?qid=225&amp;cntIDs=&amp;stdIDs="> 97% think that they are either "bad" or "very bad"</a>. If both questions were proxying for the same latent variable we would not expect this extreme gap. If 17% of respondents "support" drone strikes and only 2% of respondents think that drone attacks are a good thing, then a significant majority of those who say they "support" strikes also think that they are "bad" or "very bad" - a strange puzzle. While it's not inconceivable for people to say that they support policies that they think are bad, a more likely explanation is that respondents' answers are strongly affected by the way the questions are worded and that the question used by Fair et. al. may not be a good proxy for the quantity of interest.<br /><br />So what's the problem with the question? The main issue is that it asks respondents to evaluate a hypothetical future scenario rather than reflect on the existing drone program.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">I'm going to read you a list of things the US might do to combat extremist groups in Pakistan. Please tell me whether you would support or oppose...conducting drone attacks in conjunction with the Pakistani government against leaders of extremist groups.&nbsp;</blockquote>The question is not about what the US is currently doing to combat extremist groups, it is asking instead whether respondents would support a course of action that the US <i>might</i>&nbsp;take. Importantly, this course is framed in a way that is likely more appealing than the status quo.<br /><br />First, it states that these drone attacks will be conducted in "conjunction" with the Pakistani government. While I don't know how this term was translated, it certainly suggests a lot more involvement by the Pakistani government than currently exists. The Pakistani government may "tacitly approve" the existing US drone program, but it is difficult to characterize drone attacks as being conducted in "conjunction" with Islamabad. Pew's survey respondents seem to agree - a significant majority (69%) believe that the U.S. is<a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/question-search/?qid=1138&amp;cntIDs=&amp;stdIDs="> exclusively </a>"conducting" the drone attacks, but a <a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/question-search/?qid=253&amp;cntIDs=&amp;stdIDs=">plurality</a> (47%) believe that the attacks carry the approval of the government of Pakistan. Given that the unilateral nature of the strikes is often cited as a reason for their unpopularity, a respondent may support (or at least not oppose) the proposal in the question while still opposing the drone program as it is currently conducted.<br /><br />Second, the question makes no mention of possible civilian casualties or other drawbacks while highlighting the benefits of combating extremists, a threat that&nbsp;<a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/question-search/?qid=448&amp;cntIDs=@36-@36.50-&amp;stdIDs=@201201">many</a>&nbsp;Pakistanis are concerned about. This may be minor, but it matters a lot. As Fair et. al. point out, the drone debate is a low-information environment. When respondents' attitudes about a policy are not well crystallized, subtle differences in question wording that highlight different costs or benefits can have a major impact on the responses given. For example, Michael Hiscox found [<a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3877826?uid=3739696&amp;uid=2&amp;uid=4&amp;uid=3739256&amp;sid=21101571348593">gated</a>/<a href="http://dspace.cigilibrary.org/jspui/bitstream/123456789/19382/1/Through%20a%20Glass%20and%20Darkly%20Attitudes%20Toward%20International%20Trade%20and%20the%20Curious%20Effects%20of%20Issue%20Framing.pdf?1">ungated draft</a>] that question framing had a sizable effect on Americans' support or opposition to international trade liberalization - another case where the average respondent is typically not well-informed. Respondents exposed to a brief anti-trade introduction were 17% less likely to support free trade.<br /><br />Certainly, the question that Fair et. al. use is not explicitly presenting respondents with a pro-drone viewpoint. However, it is still very likely that framing effects are skewing the responses. Consider <a href="http://www.pewglobal.org/question-search/?qid=225&amp;cntIDs=&amp;stdIDs=">another question</a> asked by Pew that is simpler and more direct<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Do you think these drone attacks are a very good thing, good thing, bad thing, or very bad thing?</blockquote>1% said "very good", 1% said "good", <b>23%</b> said "bad" and <b>74%</b> said "very bad."<br /><br />I'm not arguing that this question is a superior measure. For example, it may not be measuring approval of drone strikes themselves, but rather a general sentiment toward the US (among the heavily male/internet-savvy subset interviewed). It may overstate "true" opposition, suggesting discontent with the way the program has been conducted but support for the idea of drone attacks. It might even be a consequence of social desirability bias. The point is that we don't know from the data that we have. Question framing has a substantial impact on survey responses and researchers should be careful about drawing conclusions without clarifying their assumptions about what the survey questions are measuring.<br /><br />The question used in the study by Fair et. al. to measure support/opposition to the US drone program is <i>not</i>&nbsp;simply asking whether Pakistanis support or oppose the US drone program. It is asking whether Pakistanis <i>would</i>&nbsp;support a hypothetical drone program <i>coordinated</i>&nbsp;with the Pakistani government. Moreover, it exclusively highlights the benefits of such a program rather than the costs. This would not be a problem if support were invariant to question wording, but this is decidedly not the case. And even with the rather favorable framing, only 17% of respondents said that they would approve of drone strikes against extremists.<br /><br />So I'm a little skeptical of the claim that commentators have been grossly overestimating the level of opposition to drone strikes. I certainly would not call Pakistani opposition to the drone program a "vocal plurality." This isn't to say that improved transparency and better PR on the part of the US would do nothing to improve perceptions, but it is a very difficult task that is constrained at multiple levels. Even if the Pakistani government were to become directly involved in the drone program (very unlikely given the political consequences), the survey results suggest that it would gather the support of about 17% of the subset of Pakistanis who are currently informed about the drone program.<br /><br />The most important takeaway is that we simply don't know enough from the survey data. It's just too blunt. However, it does point to issue framing and elite rhetoric as important elements of opinion-formation on drones, suggesting interesting avenues for survey experiment work in the future.<br /><br />h/t to <a href="http://fparena.blogspot.com/">Phil Arena</a> for tweeting the link to the Atlantic article.Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-13749581159414720392012-10-04T11:01:00.002-07:002012-10-04T11:06:40.857-07:00Who Said What in Last Night's Debate?Last night's Presidential debate in Denver seems to have ended with a media-declared Romney victory. Buzzfeed's Ben Smith <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/how-mitt-romney-won-the-first-debate">called it</a> 42 minutes in, Chris Matthews was <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=7AzmXeZgGS0">livid</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;Big Bird is fearing for his job.<br /><br />I listened to the debate primarily audio-only and watched my twitter feed more than the actual two candidates and I got the sense that Obama performed a bit better than the immediate internet consensus, though I generally agree that Romney came off as more confident and on-message. It would be a mistake to read too much into the content of the debate (as Intrade has) and I agree with John Sides that Romney's win <a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/10/03/post-debate-predictions/">won't do much </a>to move the polls.<br /><br />What did interest me post-debate was what divisions between Obama and Romney could be seen in the types of words they used in their speeches. Governor Romney seemed particularly focused on the economy (as the fundamentals would suggest) and the President seemed generally aloof and unfocused on any one particular issue or line of attack, apart from a somewhat extended discussion of Medicare late in the debate. More generally, what did the debate reveal about partisan divisions in rhetoric?<br /><br />I made a plot of all of the important words used in the debate (taken from ABC News'<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/presidential-debate-transcript-denver-colo-oct/story?id=17390260#.UG2ms-A0kjE"> transcript</a>) and computed a value for each one based on how likely a given word was to appear in Governor Romney's speech vs. how likely it was to appear in President Obama's speech. <i>For more details on the method I used, see the bottom of the post.</i>&nbsp;The words on the left are words that tended to be used more by the President and the words on the right are more common in Romney's speeches. I've also re-sized each word based on how often it appeared in both candidates' speech - larger words are generally more frequent.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qRKVCFUdJtk/UG2no2f84rI/AAAAAAAAAJY/sAuYHzIDD_s/s1600/wordusage.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="185" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qRKVCFUdJtk/UG2no2f84rI/AAAAAAAAAJY/sAuYHzIDD_s/s320/wordusage.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />It's a bit hard to make out a lot of the words since there are a lot of irrelevant or only incidentally partisan words clustered around the middle. I re-did the same plot two more times, first only including the words that were used more than five times overall and again with words that were used more than ten times (the most common words in the debate).<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kY2Y5ckZtgw/UG2oLxmU7JI/AAAAAAAAAJo/8VoUA9aJdyM/s1600/words5times.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="185" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kY2Y5ckZtgw/UG2oLxmU7JI/AAAAAAAAAJo/8VoUA9aJdyM/s320/words5times.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bA-2b19VgI0/UG2oLaj0JVI/AAAAAAAAAJg/wmj4mKE5rWg/s1600/words10Times.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="207" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bA-2b19VgI0/UG2oLaj0JVI/AAAAAAAAAJg/wmj4mKE5rWg/s320/words10Times.png" width="320" /></a></div>What can we take away from this?<br /><br />Intuitively, the results seem to reflect clear divisions in rhetoric between the two parties, though the distinction is surprisingly less sharp than the much more heated rhetoric of the campaign would suggest. Governor Romney tended to focus more on economic issues (as expected), while President Obama focused on issues that he generally "owns" (health care and Medicaid in particular). Some partisan divides in rhetoric are evident - for example, tax policy: words like "wall street", "loophole", and "profit" and "corporation" are more frequent in President Obama's speech.<br /><br />Moreover, the data seem to confirm the general takeaway that Governor Romney was smoother and more focused in his message than President Obama. Of the most frequent words, most appear to cluster either around the center or the right. Governor Romney's rhetoric was also markedly more generic than President Obama's, which reflects his newfound shift towards the center.<br /><br />Substantively, the candidates spent the debate discussing the same issues and largely on the same terms. Most words, and particularly the most common ones, cluster around the center, meaning that both candidates are roughly equally likely to use them in their speeches. Apart from tax policy, neither candidate is looking to reframe an issue in a particularly unique way. Rather, each discusses the same issue (like the deficit), using very similar frames. This is just as expected - the candidates are not looking to differentiate themselves ideologically.<br /><br />But despite the overarching similarities in the two candidates' rhetoric, it's interesting to note the subtle partisanship in some of the candidates' word choices. As expected, both candidates spent a lot of time talking about the "middle class," but the phrase "middle class" is almost exclusively an "Obama"-word. Governor Romney prefers to use "middle income" rather than "middle class," perhaps to avoid the more "leftist" connotations of the term "class."<br /><br />Likewise, we see a rather marked difference when the two candidates discuss education - President Obama tends to focus on college while Governor Romney talks about the K-12 system.<br /><br />It's also very clear that President Obama is a huge fan of using the word "folks" rather than "people."<br /><br />Ultimately, though, what's really interesting is not the words that were used, but the words that were not used. The word "women" was entirely absent from the debate (giving a new meaning to the "<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/9-reasons-just-for-men-is-trending-in-the-us-t">just for men</a>" meme that started trending on twitter). "Immigration" was also nowhere to be found. Trade received a passing mention from President Obama and the closest this debate got to "wonky" was a rather vague discussion of health care reform where neither candidate seemed entirely comfortable. For those wanting an actual debate over issues (i.e. people who have already decided who they are voting for), this, like every debate, was lacking.<br /><br />Given both the role of the debates in the election process and the overall incentives facing both Obama and Romney at this point in the campaign, this is all entirely expected - campaigns are meant precisely for people who don't pay attention to campaigns.<br /><br />Thoughts?<br /><br />---------------------<br /><i>Note on methods</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>I used a relatively straightforward technique to generate partisan scores for each word in the debate. After splitting the debate transcript into three separate documents for Obama, Romney and Lehrer, I removed all punctuation and capitalization from the texts along with any uninformative "stop" words (the, a, an, as, etc...) from each. I then applied a "stemming" algorithm to consolidate similar words into a single root ("regulate", "regulating", "regulation" all reduce to "regul").&nbsp;</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>I counted the number of times each word occurred in each speech, adding 0.5 to all of the zeroes (to prevent division by zero in the next step). That is, if a word appeared 5 times in one candidate's speeches and zero times in another, I treated that 0 as 0.5 words.</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>I then normalized the data by dividing each word count by the total number of words used by the candidate. This gives the relative <b>frequency </b>of each word/word stem. I converted the frequencies to odds (frequency/(1-frequency)) and for each word in the data, divided Romney's odds by Obama's odds. This generated an odds ratio, with ratios greater than 1 representing words that were more likely to be used by Romney and ratios less than 1 representing more "Obama"-oriented words. Finally, I logged the odds ratio to get a linearized variable that I plot on the x-axis. Words taking positive values (on the right) are more likely to appear in Governor Romney's speech and words taking negative values (on the left) are more likely to appear in President Obama's speech. Words clustering around 0 are equally likely to appear in both candidates' rhetoric.</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>Each word is re-sized by the log of its overall count in the dataset, and colored red-to-blue based on the x-axis variable.</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>A better (though more complex) way to visualize this sort of data was also developed by Monroe, Colaresi and Quinn (2009).</i>Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-35262495799312579842012-06-26T19:42:00.002-07:002012-06-26T19:47:12.301-07:00The Fundamental Uncertainty of ScienceWhile I have not had much time for the mini data-gathering/research projects that I usually try to post on this blog, I found the recent flurry over Professor Jacqueline Stevens' New York Times editorial "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/opinion/sunday/political-scientists-are-lousy-forecasters.html?_r=2&amp;pagewanted=all">Political Scientists are Lousy Forecasters</a>" (and the <a href="http://stateswithoutnations.blogspot.com/2012/06/more-on-sunday-review-essay.html">follow-up</a> on her blog) worth commenting on a bit more.<br /><br />The political science blogosphere has <a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/06/24/more-reactions-to-the-stephens-op-ed/">since</a><a href="http://saideman.blogspot.ca/2012/06/self-hating-political-scientist.html"> responded</a> <a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/06/24/dart-throwing-chimps-and-op-eds/">in</a> <a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/06/24/why-the-stevens-op-ed-is-wrong/">full-force </a>(and <a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/06/23/traditionalist-claims-that-modern-art-could-just-as-well-be-replaced-by-a-paint-throwing-chimp/">snark</a>). I agree entirely with the already stated criticisms and will try not to repeat them too much here. The editorial is at best a highly flawed &nbsp;and under-researched critique of quantitative political science and at worst a rather cynical endorsement of de-funding all NSF political science programs on the grounds that the NSF tends to fund studies using a methodological paradigm that Professor Stevens does not favor. I'll err on the side of the former.<br /><br />But one quote from the piece did irk me quite a bit:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">...the government — disproportionately — supports research that is <b>amenable to statistical analyses</b> and models even though everyone knows the <b>clean equations mask messy realities</b> that contrived data sets and assumptions don’t, and can’t, capture. <i>(emphasis mine)</i></blockquote>This statement is on-face contradictory. The entire point of statistical analysis is that we are <i>uncertain </i>about the world. That's why statisticians use confidence levels and significance tests. The existence of randomness does not make all attempts at analyzing data meaningless, it just means that there is always some inconclusiveness to the findings that scientists make. We speak of <i>degrees</i>&nbsp;of certainty.&nbsp;Those who use statistical methods to analyze data are pretty clear that none of their conclusions are capital-T truths and the best political science tends to refrain from any absolute statements. Indeed, this is a reason for why a gap tends to exist between the political science and the policymaking communities. Those who enact policy want exact and determinate guidance while political scientists are cautious about making such absolute and declarative statements. It is depressing to see these sorts of caricatures of quantitative methods being used to denounce the entire field. Simply put, just because physics is very quantitative and physics <i>appears</i>&nbsp;to describe very clean and determinate relationships does not mean that <i>all</i>&nbsp;uses of math in social science result in only simple, exact and absolutely certain conclusions.<br /><br />But putting aside that highly inaccurate picture, Professor Stevens' definition of what constitutes scientific knowledge is remarkably limiting.&nbsp;<span style="background-color: white;">Prof. Stevens is staking out a very extreme position</span><span style="background-color: white;">&nbsp;by implying that the existence of randomness - "messy realities" as she calls it - makes all attempts at quantification meaningless. &nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: white;">She argues for a very radical version of Popper's philosophy of science, positing that any theory should be considered falsified if it is contradicted by a single counter-example. It's unfortunate that Prof. Stevens glosses over the extensive philosophical debate that has followed in the eight-or-so decades after Popper, but this is inevitable given the space of a typical NYT column. Nevertheless, it is very disappointing that the OpEd gives the impression that Popperian falibilism is the gold standard of scientific method and the philosophy of science, when in fact, the scientific community has moved far beyond such a strict standard for what constitutes knowledge. While I won't go into a full dissection of Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Bayesian probability theory, and so on, it suffices to say that Stevens' reading of Popper would discount not only political science, but <i>most</i>&nbsp;modern sciences. Accounting for and dealing with randomness is at the heart of what so many scientists in all disciplines do.</span><br /><br /><span style="background-color: white;">By rejecting the idea that probabilistic hypotheses could be considered "scientific," Professor Stevens is perpetuating another caricature - one of science as a bastion of certitude. It's a depiction that resonates well with the popular image of science, but it is far from the truth. I'm reminded of a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDYba0m6ztE">quote </a>by Irish comedian Dara O Briain:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white;">"Science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise, it would stop."</span></blockquote><span style="background-color: white;">All science is fundamentally about uncertainty and ignorance. Knowledge is always partial and incomplete. There was actually an interesting <a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/06/01/154148658/why-ignorance-trumps-knowledge-in-scientific-pursuit">interview</a> with neuroscientist Stuart Firestein on NPR's Science Friday on this topic a few weeks back, where he offered this valuable quote:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">...the answers that count - not that answers and facts aren't important in science, of course - but the ones that we want, the ones that we care about the most, are the ones that create newer and better questions because it's really the questions that it's about.</blockquote><span style="background-color: white;">Ultimately, I would argue that probabilistic hypotheses in the social sciences still have scientific value. Events tend to have multiple causes and endogeneity is an ever-present problem. This does not automatically make systematic, scientific and quantitative, inquiry into social phenomena a futile endeavor. Making perfect predictions the standard for what is "science" would dramatically constrain the sphere scientific research. (See Jay Ulfelder's <a href="http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2012/06/24/in-defense-of-political-science-and-forecasting/">post </a>for more on predictions). Climate scientists constantly debate the internal mechanics of their models of global warming - some predict faster rates, some slower. Does this mean that the underlying relationships described by those models (such as between CO2 concentration and temperature) should be ignored because the research is too "unsettled"? While deniers of climate change would argue yes, the answer here is a definite no.&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><br /><span style="background-color: white;">Or to take an example from the recent blog debates about the value of election forecasting models. Just because Douglas Hibbs' <a href="http://www.douglas-hibbs.com/Election2012/2012Election-MainPage.htm">"Bread and Peace" model</a> (among other Presidential election models) does not perfectly predict President Obama's vote percentage in November, does not mean that we can learn nothing from it. One of the most valuable contributions of this literature is that systemic factors like the economy are significantly more relevant to the final outcome than the day-to-day "horserace" of political pundits.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><br />What should be said, then, about Prof. Stevens concluding suggestion that NSF funds be allocated by lottery rather than by a rigorous screening process? Such an argument could only be justified if there were no objective means to distinguish what is and is not "scientific" research. If the criteria for what passes for real political science is simply the consensus of one group of elites, then from the standpoint of "knowledge," there is no difference between peer review and random allocation. This in fact would be the argument made that Thomas Kuhn, Popper's philosophical adversary, made about all science. But while Kuhn's criticism of a truly "objective" science was a useful corrective to 20th century scientific hubris, it too goes too far in this case, justifying an anything goes attitude towards scientific knowledge that is all too dangerous. Penn State Literature Professor Michael Bérubé' wrote a rather <a href="http://www.democracyjournal.org/19/6789.php?page=all">interesting article</a> on this exact topic as applied to science at-large, noting the worrying congruence of the highly subjectivist approach to "science studies" adopted by some in leftist academia and the anti-science rhetoric of the far-right.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">But now the climate-change deniers and the young-Earth creationists are coming after the natural scientists, just as I predicted–and they’re using some of the very arguments developed by an academic left that thought it was speaking only to people of like mind. Some standard left arguments, combined with the left-populist distrust of “experts” and “professionals” and assorted high-and-mighty muckety-mucks who think they’re the boss of us, were fashioned by the right into a powerful device for delegitimating scientific research. For example, when Andrew Ross asked in Strange Weather, “How can metaphysical life theories and explanations taken seriously by millions be ignored or excluded by a small group of powerful people called ‘scientists’?,” everyone was supposed to understand that he was referring to alternative medicine, and that his critique of “scientists” was meant to bring power to the people. The countercultural account of “metaphysical life theories” that gives people a sense of dignity in the face of scientific authority sounds good–until one substitutes “astrology” or “homeopathy” or “creationism” (all of which are certainly taken&nbsp;<span style="background-color: white;">seriously by millions) in its place.&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: white;">&nbsp;</span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">The right’s attacks on climate science, mobilizing a public distrust of scientific expertise, eventually led science-studies theorist Bruno Latour to write in Critical Inquiry:<br />Entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth…while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we meant? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not?&nbsp;<span style="background-color: white;">&nbsp;</span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good? Why, indeed? Why not say, definitively, that anthropogenic climate change is real, that vaccines do not cause autism, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and that Adam and Eve did not ride dinosaurs to church?</blockquote>In the end, Bérubé calls for some sort of commensurability between the humanities and sciences, and&nbsp;<span style="background-color: white;">I think this kind of coming together that is actually becoming the norm in political science academia, particularly as political theorists and quantitative political scientists still tend to fall under the same departmental umbrella:</span><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">So these days, when I talk to my scientist friends, I offer them a deal. I say: I’ll admit that you were right about the potential for science studies to go horribly wrong and give fuel to deeply ignorant and/or reactionary people. And in return, you’ll admit that I was right about the culture wars, and right that the natural sciences would not be held harmless from the right-wing noise machine. And if you’ll go further, and acknowledge that some circumspect, well-informed critiques of actually existing science have merit (such as the criticism that the postwar medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth had some ill effects), I’ll go further too, and acknowledge that many humanists’ critiques of science and reason are neither circumspect nor well-informed. Then perhaps we can get down to the business of how to develop safe, sustainable energy and other social practices that will keep the planet habitable.</blockquote><br />Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-38955124766134341712012-06-05T05:23:00.001-07:002012-06-05T12:52:50.837-07:00Is There a Role for International Institutions in Regulating "Cyberweapons"?<div class="tr_bq">David Sanger's extensive <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?_r=1">New York Times piece</a> about the United States and Israel's covert cyberwarfare operations on Iran's nuclear facilities is the first article I've seen that explicitly confirms the two countries' involvement in Stuxnet's development. But this revelation isn't particularly surprising. Given the virus' complexity and purpose, the list of possible developers was rather short. Rather, what I found most interesting was this section towards the end:</div><blockquote>But the good luck did not last. In the summer of 2010, shortly after a new variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that the worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had broken free, like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage. It fell to Mr. Panetta and two other crucial players in Olympic Games — General Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Michael J. Morell, the deputy director of the C.I.A. — to break the news to Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>&nbsp;An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer’s computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world. Suddenly, the code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to ordinary computer users.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>...&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>&nbsp;The question facing Mr. Obama was whether the rest of Olympic Games was in jeopardy, now that a variant of the bug was replicating itself “in the wild,” where computer security experts can dissect it and figure out its purpose.&nbsp;&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>&nbsp;“I don’t think we have enough information,” Mr. Obama told the group that day, according to the officials. But in the meantime, he ordered that the cyberattacks continue. They were his best hope of disrupting the Iranian nuclear program unless economic sanctions began to bite harder and reduced Iran’s oil revenues.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>Within a week, another version of the bug brought down just under 1,000 centrifuges. Olympic Games was still on.</blockquote>The excerpt highlights one of the unique and troubling aspects of "cyberweapons" - their use against adversaries permits their proliferation. Despite all of the effort at keeping Stuxnet both hidden and narrowly tailored, the virus escaped into the public and its source code is open to be analyzed by pretty much everyone. While competent coding can make it difficult to reverse engineer and re-deploy the virus against other targets without a significant investment of time and resources, it's still a distinct possibility. Cyberweapons create externalities - side-effects that don't directly affect the militaries using them, but can have spill-over consequences on other sectors of society. For example, a SCADA worm like Stuxnet which targets industrial control systems could theoretically be re-targeted at civilian infrastructure like power or manufacturing plants.<br /><br />Certainly most governments using cyberwarfare will likely want to limit these externalities since they do create an indirect threat (such as non-state actor attacks on critical infrastructure). This is evidenced by the fact that the U.S. and Israel not only tried to designed Stuxnet and its ilk to be difficult to detect, but also to have very tailored aims. The virus was designed to work on the <i>specific </i>reactor designs possessed by Iran, thereby somewhat limiting the initial damage of a leak (imagine what would have happened were Stuxnet to deploy its "payload" on <i>all </i>computer systems that it lands on). Nevertheless, these externalities exist so long as governments with the capacity to do so continue to use cyber espionage and attacks. The logic of collective action suggests that governments are also unlikely to unilaterally refrain altogether from utilizing these technologies since a blanket ban would be both impossible and entirely unverifiable due to the dual-use nature of the weapons.<br /><br />This got me thinking a bit about what sorts of institutions could help mitigate some of the consequences of "leaks". Proposals for an international cyberweapons convention have been thrown around, but most have been very vague and poorly defined. Kaspersky Labs founder Evgeny Kaspersky <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/exec-tech/cyber-weapons-conventions-needed-kaspersky-tells-cebit/story-fn5nkg7c-1226363576491">recently suggested</a> a treaty along the lines of the Biological Weapons Convention or the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (the Russian government has also floated similar proposals). However, an out-right ban on "cyberweapons" would be highly unlikely and generally impractical. As I mentioned, verifying compliance would be substantially more difficult than it has been for either the BWC or the NPT. Given that both have been violated by a number of states party to them via clandestine programs, a "cyberweapons" ban would be toothless, even if it only banned particular types of attacks (such as those on SCADA systems). Moreover, states find cyber-capabilities significantly more versatile and useful than either biological or nuclear weapons. The category of "cyberweapon" is broad enough to include highly-developed viral sabotage (Stuxnet) to simple distributed denial of service (DDOS) and these sorts of technologies are useful not only to militaries, but also to intelligence services. Finally, the dual-use nature of information technology and its globalization make locking-in a "cyberwarfare oligopoly" a-la the nuclear monopoly of the NPT near-impossible. The "haves" cannot credibly promise disarmament to the "have-nots" and the "have-nots" face significantly lower barriers to developing basic cyber-espionage or warfare capabilities.<br /><a name='more'></a><br /><br />If restraining the development of electronic/information warfare techniques is not possible, could certain aspects of this "warfare" be regulated to limit unnecessary damage and suffering? One of the more promising suggestions made by many scholars would be some sort of addendum to the regime governing the Laws of Armed Combat clarifying what is unacceptable targeting and disruption of civilian infrastructure from cyberweapons. Drawing the line between what is civilian and what is military in such a murky field is certainly a challenge, and even if states do agree to a set of limits along the lines of the Hague Convention, the problem of enforcement remains. However, I think enforcement in this case is much less difficult (though still a significant task) than it is in the "weapons ban" case, largely because of the way states' incentives are aligned.<br /><br />The attribution problem is certainly a significant one and a sizable barrier to effectively enforcing limitations on cyberwarfare. Through the use of proxies, non-state third parties, IP spoofing and other, more advanced techniques for obfuscating one's identity, attackers can avoid detection, and thereby censure. However, this challenge is not insurmountable. Security experts are already <a href="http://www.cs3-inc.com/pubs/Attack_Attribution_in_Non-Cooperative_Networks.pdf">developing methods</a> for attributing routed or masked packets. Additionally, the type of attack and its target also give clues as to the likely culprit. The attacks against Estonia and Georgia left really only a single probable source - Russia. Likewise, the complexity of Stuxnet, and its apparent target - Iran - made the U.S. and Israel the probable originators. While it may be difficult to link the behavior of in-state proxies to the direct orders of the government, especially since governments are likely to vociferously deny their involvement, it is certainly a solvable problem. International institutions could possibly play a role in improving detection and attribution of attacks. By assembling and coordinating cross-national groups of experts and technological resources, an institution modeled along the lines of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty's International Monitoring System (which watches for evidence of unlawful nuclear testing), could help overcome the difficulty of attribution.<br /><br />The risk of discovery can itself play a role in tempering the reckless use of cyberweapons and international institutions can play a role in building expertise for better global detection. But independently of whether they can get away with it or not, states have a reason to refrain from attacks that are too broad. As I argued previously, releasing a worm with a very broad objective risks substantial blowback. Either the virus will replicate itself in an unintended manner (as in the case of Stuxnet) or it can be easily modified to attack new targets. States have a reason to keep their weapons "precise" or limited in complexity. Additionally, the dependence of many economies on global markets that are underpinned by information and communication technologies makes "all-out" attacks on a country's civilian infrastructure highly unlikely.<br /><br />An international agreement on what is "unacceptable" cyberattack, even if merely aspirational, could buttress the already existing reasons that states have to keep their cyberwarfare operations in check.&nbsp;And while it is unclear how responsive leaders will be to any such "costs" of violating the agreement, it may nevertheless have a valuable signalling purpose. The United States, as the current "leader" in cyber-offensive capabilities, has an interest in sending a message to other countries that it will not use them recklessly. After the Stuxnet revelations, it may be wise for the U.S. formally commit to a limitation on cyber-attacks on non-combatant infrastructure (such as medical facilities or large power grids), especially now that it is clear that such attacks could certainly be carried out. By "tying its hands" with the weight of global opinion, the United States might calm the fears of other states and dissuade them from rushing headlong into rapidly developing similar weapons. Perhaps more importantly, an international commitment to a set of "laws of technological combat" would reinforce the U.S.' already existing incentives to keep its operations contained, thereby minimizing the externality of cyber-proliferation.<br /><br />However, agreeing on a set of "rules" will take a sizable amount of time and effort. In the short term, an institutional solution is more likely to come from the sub-governmental or non-governmental levels. The best way to limit the impact of cyberweapon leaks is to improve the capacity of public and private sector infrastructure to defend itself. This is not something that all states need necessarily do on their own. It may be useful to pool the expertise of non-governmental digital security experts and connect it to relevant government agencies and infrastructure operators. A "World Health Organization" for cybersecurity, which would issue policy guidance to governments and private-sector actors on how to best secure their data and systems from attack could help minimize the damage from new security threats that get released into the wild. Quick responsiveness to "zero-day vulnerabilities" - those security holes that have yet to be discovered and patched by software manufacturers - is essential. Additionally, so many cyberattacks rely on poor security practices by the targets. Even the Iranian attacks, as sophisticated as they were, depended on scientists failing to realize the dangers of using insecure USB drives to transfer information. The same poor practices likely occur in civilian infrastructure in most countries, despite the enormous amounts of money poured into developing security systems. Although companies like Kaspersky and Symantec already provide some of this guidance, aggregating expertise into an international organization whose <i>primary</i>&nbsp;goal is to issue comprehensive policy advice could further enhance the resilience of global infrastructure to rogue cyberattacks.<br /><br />The "threat" of cyberterrorism is perpetually over-hyped and exaggerated. Nevertheless, as states develop more advanced technologies for espionage and technological disruption, the capabilities of non-state actors are also likely to grow. As the Stuxnet case shows, military-developed viruses can become available to the world at large when used. Cyberweapons are likely to proliferate upon use. Just as nuclear weapons generated the negative externality of radiation from nuclear testing, cyberweapons generate their own negative externality. Since no state is going to give up its technological capabilities any time soon, it is important to begin establishing regimes governing their use and minimizing their "fallout."<br /><br /><br />Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-15858604841597062642012-04-16T11:57:00.000-07:002012-04-16T11:57:59.296-07:00Plans for Next Fall and Blog UpdatesI've been rather slow at updating the blog recently, mostly as I have shuttling back and forth between graduate school visits. It's been somewhat exhausting, but the entire process has been a remarkable journey. Thanks to all of the profs, admins, current graduate students and fellow members of my cohort for making these visits so phenomenal.<br /><br />So, the decision deadline has passed and, this fall I will be joining the PhD program in Government at Harvard University.<br /><br />While the end of the grad school application process should free up more of my time, it also coincides rather well with finals season, so updates will continue to be rather sporadic (maybe I can learn to write shorter posts :) ). I'm looking forward to having some time in May to write a bit more frequently!Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-36145389300865081222012-04-03T09:41:00.000-07:002012-04-03T09:41:22.454-07:00Not feeling the 'physics envy'Kevin Clarke and David Primo have an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/opinion/sunday/the-social-sciences-physics-envy.html?_r=1&amp;ref=physics">op-ed</a> in the New York Times that critiques the dominance of what they call "hypothetico-deductivism" in political science - the idea that in order to study politics "scientifically," one must follow a specific method:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">This might seem like a worthy aspiration. Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it. The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world. If the hypothesis is confirmed, the theoretical model holds; if the hypothesis is not confirmed, the theoretical model does not hold. If your discipline does not operate by this method — known as hypothetico-deductivism — then in the minds of many, it’s not scientific.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Such reasoning dominates the social sciences today. Over the last decade, the National Science Foundation has spent many millions of dollars supporting an initiative called Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models, which espouses the importance of hypothetico-deductivism in political science research. For a time, The American Journal of Political Science explicitly refused to review theoretical models that weren’t tested. In some of our own published work, we have invoked the language of model testing, yielding to the pressure of this way of thinking.</blockquote><br />The NYT piece is a summary of the argument that they make more extensively in their book <i>A Model Discipline</i>.&nbsp;I have yet to read the book, so I can't speak to any differences/nuances developed there that don't necessarily come out in the op-ed. As far as I can tell, Primo and Clarke's main point is that political science has become too much of a methodological monoculture and that we should not be opposed to engaging in theoretical work that is not necessarily empirically testable or empirical work that doesn't aim to "test" a pre-determined theory.<br /><br />I entirely agree with the call for diversity in methods - the question should guide the choice of tool and not the other way around. There's plenty of great theoretical work that is impossible to test systematically, but nevertheless useful. Moreover, empirical research that isn't guided by any particular theory can still generate interesting questions and find surprising relationships between variables. The rise of "big data" makes the search for these sorts of correlations even more relevant since there is so much information that has yet to even be examined by political scientists.<br /><br />But I don't get the sense that the next generation of political scientists is necessarily being taught that "hypothetico-deductivism" is <i>the</i>&nbsp;way to do research. Sure, maybe journals have underlying biases, but I don't think that bias is unique to methods - top-tier journals have a reputation to protect and will <i>by necessity</i>&nbsp;be risk-averse in publishing anything "new." As far as training goes,&nbsp;from talking to professors during graduate student visits, I certainly did not get the sense that <i>all</i>&nbsp;theoretical models must have empirically testable implications and that <i>all</i>&nbsp;empirical research should be backed up by theoretical models (however haphazard). I actually brought up the topic of empirical testing in a few of my conversations with some of the formal theorists and got more or less the same response as what Primo and Clarke seem to be arguing. Maybe I'm underinformed since I'm only an incoming graduate student, but if there's significant pressure towards "hypothetico-deductivism," I'm definitely not picking up on it.<br /><br />The last thing that slightly irked me about the article, and this is likely more the fault of the New York Times op-ed board trying to make an editorial on the philosophy of science as applied to poli-sci appealing to the general public, is the subtle invocation of the old trope that "social science" isn't a "hard" science like physics or chemistry and social scientists shouldn't bother trying to emulate the "real" sciences. Often this tends to be accompanied by lazy bromides about how human behavior is "inherently unpredictable" and that it's impossible to predict the <i>really important</i>&nbsp;events in political history. However, this doesn't seem to be what Primo and Clarke are arguing at all (which is why I'm puzzled by their use of the phrase 'physics envy' - as Erik Voeten <a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/04/02/physics-envy/">pointed out,</a> even <i>physicists</i>&nbsp;don't subscribe to hypothetico-deductivism as the <i>only</i>&nbsp;way to do physics). Rather than dismiss rigor in political science, they're calling for <i>more </i>of it - for more creative and insightful methodological approaches to poli-sci questions. In this sense, I think they're presenting an argument similar to the one Dan Nexon made<a href="http://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/2012/03/professionalization-and-poverty-of-ir.html"> last week </a>on the "overprofessionalization" of academia. Certainly Primo and Clarke are not calling for total method-free "thinking" about politics - that's what political analysis and the NYT/WaPo op-ed pages are for.<br /><br />If there's a square peg and round hole problem, it's definitely not between social science and "science."Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-66076464995900542802012-03-22T21:47:00.000-07:002012-03-22T21:47:09.588-07:00Electoral Fraud and the Russian Presidential Election - Part 2In the <a href="http://www.causalloop.blogspot.com/2012/03/electoral-fraud-and-russian.html">previous post</a>, I examined some of the more basic graphical indicators of electoral fraud in the Russian presidential election.<br /><br />How else can election data be analyzed for evidence of fraud? One of the most common approaches is to study the distribution of a particular digit in the results. The Guardian <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/mar/05/russia-putin-voter-fraud-statistics">posted </a>a brief article that evaluated the first digits of electoral returns using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law">Benford's Law</a>, which posits that numbers arising from certain natural processes will have leading digits that are distributed logarithmically (1 is more common as a leading digit than 9). While the election results for Putin don't appear to conform to Benford's law, it is unlikely that the law is a relevant metric of voter fraud. Since precinct or region-level returns do not encompass enough orders of magnitude, the method is a poor indicator. However, <a href="http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/">Walter Mebane</a> has done extensive work applying Benford's law to the distributions of the second digit in electoral data and this method may be more fruitful in detecting fraud in Russia.<br /><br />Conversely, one can examine the last digits of the election returns. Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco used such an approach to reveal likely electoral malfeasance in <a href="https://files.nyu.edu/bb89/public/files/Beber_Scacco_ElectionFraud.pdf">Nigeria</a> and in the 2009 <a href="https://files.nyu.edu/als8/public/files/Beber_Scacco_The_Devil_Is_in_the_Digits.pdf">Iranian </a>presidential election. They posit that, in a "clean" election, the final digit in the raw vote or turnout counts at the precinct-level should be uniformly distributed. Since a single vote is inconsequential in deciding an electoral outcome, the last digit is essentially an error term (the full, more complicated, proof is in the first link above). However, if electoral results are tampered with and the result sheets are being filled in arbitrarily, the distribution of last digits may deviate from uniformity. This is because humans tend to be terrible at generating truly random sequences of numbers. Beber and Scacco cite a number of studies of that suggest cognitive biases toward smaller over larger numbers, avoidance of repetitive sequences (like 333), and preference for adjacent numbers. Comparing the results of the Swedish parliamentary elections to electoral data from Nigeria's Plateau state, they find strong uniformity in the former and significant deviations in the latter.<br /><br />I applied Beber and Scacco's method to election returns from Russia, looking specifically at the last digit distribution in reported numbers of registered voters at the precinct and district levels. If election officials are not out-right fabricating candidates' vote totals, but instead votes are being inflated via ballot-stuffing, then by necessity, registered voter counts still would need to be altered slightly in order to accommodate these “artificial” ballots. In order to avoid impossible and embarrassing reports of greater than 100% turnout, some fudging of the numbers might be needed.<br /><br />A quick aside on terminology/method. The Russian election commission reports results aggregated at three levels – the republic/province level (equivalent to states), the “sub-republic” level (essentially, city/county subdivisions in each province) and at the precinct level (with data from each local polling center or uchastkovaya izbiratel'naya komissia (UIK)). I use the “sub-republic” data for the Russia-wide test and precinct level data in testing individual provinces. I also exclude any turnout figure that has less than 3 digits to ensure that the last digit is sufficiently "irrelevant".<br /><br />First, at the national level, there is some evidence that the last digits for registered voter counts do not follow a uniform distribution. The graph below shows that the data contain significantly more 2s than expected (outside the 95% confidence bound). Additionally, a chi-squared test returns a p-value of .029, suggesting statistically significant (at alpha = .05) deviation from uniformity.<br /><div><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nkQWtWJAXCE/T2v-aTJHmYI/AAAAAAAAAIw/uMUuVniwdf4/s1600/1-allRussia.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="319" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nkQWtWJAXCE/T2v-aTJHmYI/AAAAAAAAAIw/uMUuVniwdf4/s320/1-allRussia.png" width="320" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />Is there variation across regions? Anecdotal evidence suggests so. The most egregious reports of fraud tend to come from “peripheral” regions, particularly Chechnya and Dagestan which consistently report absurd levels of support for Putin/Medvedev and United Russia. Reports from Moscow and St. Petersburg (the centers of the protest movement) tend to be more subdued. Indeed, Moscow City was the only region where Putin was only able to obtain a plurality of the vote as opposed to a majority.<br /><br />Conducting the last-digit test on registered voting data from each polling-place in these four regions seems to confirm that fraud levels vary significantly within Russia. The graphs below suggest that neither Moscow nor St. Petersburg show any significant deviation from uniformity. Chi-squared tests for both regions are also not statistically significant.<br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gRV7k-kf55s/T2v-dKnNijI/AAAAAAAAAI4/hhWj4n9sx_c/s1600/2-Moscow.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="319" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gRV7k-kf55s/T2v-dKnNijI/AAAAAAAAAI4/hhWj4n9sx_c/s320/2-Moscow.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-f1zpRq1YMEU/T2v-fvr203I/AAAAAAAAAJA/6tA0Zrauf64/s1600/3-StPeter.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="319" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-f1zpRq1YMEU/T2v-fvr203I/AAAAAAAAAJA/6tA0Zrauf64/s320/3-StPeter.png" width="320" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />Chechnya, where Putin received 99% of the total vote, and Dagestan, where Putin's numbers were slightly lower (93%), tell a different story. Both show dramatic deviation from uniformity with a tendency to emphasize lower numbers, particularly zero and five. Chi-squared tests for both are also significant at the 1% level.<br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-X94UZ0f2a-U/T2v-gvZjQNI/AAAAAAAAAJI/FO7tlG-sM0Q/s1600/4-Chechnya.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="319" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-X94UZ0f2a-U/T2v-gvZjQNI/AAAAAAAAAJI/FO7tlG-sM0Q/s320/4-Chechnya.png" width="320" /></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FmGV5JiN0Nw/T2v-huJepcI/AAAAAAAAAJQ/98wVJ8NrtdU/s1600/5-Dagestan.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="319" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FmGV5JiN0Nw/T2v-huJepcI/AAAAAAAAAJQ/98wVJ8NrtdU/s320/5-Dagestan.png" width="320" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /><br />Obviously this is very cursory analysis, but it does suggest that the last-digit method is a pretty good tool for finding hints of fraud in raw election returns. Any thoughts?<br /><br /><i>Thanks to Bernd Beber for <a href="https://files.nyu.edu/bb89/public/research.htm">making available</a> the R code for running the last-digit tests and generating the graphs.</i><br /></div>Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-68198036204925895692012-03-10T12:42:00.000-08:002012-03-10T12:42:47.963-08:00Electoral Fraud and the Russian Presidential Election - Part 1To no one's surprise, Russian&nbsp;<strike>President</strike>&nbsp;<strike>Prime Minister</strike>&nbsp;President-elect Vladimir Putin won last week's election with a sizable (reported) 63.6% of the vote.<br /><br />As with pretty much any Russian election over the past decade, evidence of electoral fraud has begun to surface. Reports of "<a href="http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/what-i-saw-as-an-election-observer/454247.html">carousel voting</a>," paid voters being shuttled by bus to vote at multiple polling stations, <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/election_observers_claim_fraud_intimidation_in_russian_vote/24504685.html">ballot stuffing</a>, and an impossible figure of "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/world/europe/fraudulent-votes-for-putin-abound-in-chechnya.html">107% turnout</a>" in a Chechen precinct all suggest some degree of manipulation. Was this fraud then systematic or idiosyncratic? In the wake of the 2011 Duma elections, many Russian bloggers used statistical analysis techniques to uncover strange patterns in the reported results for United Russia. Scott Gelbach <a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/01/27/electoral-fraud-in-russia-report-from-the-russian-blogosphere/">posted</a> an English summary of some of these findings. Do the same observations hold for the presidential election?<br /><br />I gathered the precinct-level data <a href="http://www.vybory.izbirkom.ru/region/region/izbirkom?action=show&amp;root=1&amp;tvd=100100031793509&amp;vrn=100100031793505&amp;region=0&amp;global=1&amp;sub_region=0&amp;prver=0&amp;pronetvd=null&amp;vibid=100100031793509&amp;type=227">reported</a> by the Russian Election Commission and looked at the three main "problematic" distributions. The first is vote shares across precincts:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7KgeyQHmw3k/T1upJB1zb5I/AAAAAAAAAH4/PlY1vi95Pg8/s1600/putinGraph1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7KgeyQHmw3k/T1upJB1zb5I/AAAAAAAAAH4/PlY1vi95Pg8/s320/putinGraph1.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />The distribution is certainly less skewed than it was for United Russia, which can be attributed to the fact that the genuine popularity of Putin compared to his party decreased the necessity of much falsification. Nevertheless, one again sees the distribution suspiciously widen at the right end and the existence of a significant number of precincts where essentially everyone voted for Putin is likewise odd, particularly given the anecdotes from regions like Chechnya. However, the non-normality of this distribution is not necessarily conclusive evidence of fraud. It does, however, illustrate a heavily skewed and non-competitive electoral system. More odd are the spikes in the precinct counts at what appear to be the round numbers and simple fractions in the 60 to 80 percent range. Gelbach notes a similar phenomenon in the results for United Russia, though it is certainly less pronounced here<br /><br />What of the distribution of turnout*? Gelbach argues that this should be roughly normal "to the extent that voters are making idiosyncratic decisions about whether to vote rather than do something else." Yet again, one sees an upward sloping tail on the right end and a huge spike at 100.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Td0xkCYUGUQ/T1utrmociJI/AAAAAAAAAIA/Syq8cZbjzDU/s1600/putinGraph3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Td0xkCYUGUQ/T1utrmociJI/AAAAAAAAAIA/Syq8cZbjzDU/s320/putinGraph3.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />Grouping the turnout data into smaller intervals, one sees some spikiness at crucial benchmarks, though it is less pronounced compared to the results from December:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fAZl6w7Moc8/T1utxLq30XI/AAAAAAAAAIQ/v4OsFtsdLww/s1600/putinGraph2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fAZl6w7Moc8/T1utxLq30XI/AAAAAAAAAIQ/v4OsFtsdLww/s320/putinGraph2.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />Finally, turnout and percentage vote for Putin are highly correlated:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Y86sxY8Ij_c/T1u0eo-7eSI/AAAAAAAAAIY/xRpoulufyFk/s1600/putinGraph4.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Y86sxY8Ij_c/T1u0eo-7eSI/AAAAAAAAAIY/xRpoulufyFk/s320/putinGraph4.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />As with United Russia's voting percentage, Putin's results are strongly associated with turnout. As a number of people have pointed out, this does not necessarily indicate fraud. For example, a strong GOTV campaign may mean that a candidate tends to get more voters as turnout increases. Yet as Gelbach noted: "the magnitude of the relationship in Russia is such that United Russia is scooping up essentially all of the marginal votes over a certain level." In the case of Putin's results, the relationship is not as strong (again, owing to the fact that Putin's <i>actual</i>&nbsp;level of popularity is still relatively high). Nevertheless, the correlation at the upper levels of turnout is such that it's difficult to conclude that manipulation was insignificant.<br /><br />Again, the patterns in the electoral results are suggestive of some fraud, but the degree appears to be lower than in December. This may be partly due to the decreased necessity of boosting Putin's results. Indeed, the curious decision to install web-cams at all polling places may be evidence that the Kremlin, knowing that the incumbent would win handily, wanted to keep <i>overt</i>&nbsp;reports of fraud to a minimum. As Josh Tucker <a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/03/05/russia-2012-presidential-election-post-election-report/">commented</a>, if the election was meant as a signal to the public that Putin remains popular, compromising footage of ballot stuffing and ham-handed manipulation would weaken the message. So while there is a disincentive to commit visible fraud, there is still a logic behind committing less clearly observable fraud (Andrew Little wrote a good <a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/03/09/why-did-the-russian-government-install-webcams-in-polling-stations/">post</a> recently on this point).&nbsp;So the statistical evidence combined with anecdotal reports from observers strongly suggests that systematic cheating, while much less blatant than in the Duma elections, likely occurred.<br /><br /><i>Part 2 of this post will apply some more advanced statistical techniques to examine the variation in fraud levels across the different regions.</i><br /><i><br /></i><br />*I compute turnout as (Number of Valid Votes + Number of Invalid Votes)/(Number of Registered Voters). The Russian electoral commission site does not give a clear percentage figure of turnout.Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-43228406246252147452012-02-27T18:28:00.001-08:002012-02-27T19:15:06.838-08:00Could the ICC Help a Political Solution in Syria?The Center for a New American Security recently published a <a href="http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_PressureNotWar_Lynch.pdf">policy brief</a> by <a href="http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/">Marc Lynch</a> on what non-military actions the United States could take with the aim of defending the Syrian opposition and pushing for the resolution of the Syrian conflict.&nbsp;The entire paper is well worth a read, but I was particularly struck by Lynch's last proposal to leverage the threat of ICC prosecution to push key figures in the Syrian government towards cooperating on a political transition:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The time has come to demand a clear choice from Syrian regime officials. They should be clearly warned that their names are about to be referred to the ICC on charges of war crimes. It should be made clear that failure to participate in the political transition process will lead to an institutionalized legal straightjacket that would make it impossible for them to return to the international community. This should be feasible, even without Security Council agreement. Top regime officials should be left with no doubt that the window is rapidly closing on their ability to defect from the regime and avoid international prosecution. <br /><br />To date, Syrian officials have not been referred to the ICC, in order to keep alive the prospect of a negotiated transition. Asad must have an exit strategy, by this thinking, or else he will fight to the death. However, Asad has shown no signs of being willing to take a political deal, and in any case, his crimes are now so extensive that he cannot have a place in the new Syrian political order. He should be forced to make a clear choice: He can step down and agree to a political transition now, and still have an opportunity for exile, or he can face international justice and permanent isolation. He should also be forced to make this choice quickly. Beyond Asad himself, the threatened indictments should be targeted to incentivize for those not named to rapidly abandon Asad and his inner circle in order to maintain their own viable political future.</blockquote>I think this is a fair point and matches up with a typical model of the kind of decision-making logic that Bashar al-Assad is facing right now. Hypothetically, he can choose to accept or reject an offer for mediation and exile. That's certainly worth a lot less than simply suppressing the opposition. However, it is probably worth more than a lifetime at the Hague were Assad to "lose" in a civil war. Absent ICC prosecution, Assad could simply take his chances and fight, keeping open the exile option once defeat becomes inevitable. But with the threat of ICC charges, an easy flight to exile becomes more difficult as fewer countries are suitable "safe havens." Moreover, a negotiated transition minimizes the risk that Assad will face a Gaddafi-like end if the opposition were to gain the upper hand. Threatening ICC prosecution provides a clear incentive to negotiate instead of continuing to fight the opposition by eliminating (or at least complicating) Assad's "out" (exile) if fighting fails. Below is a quick diagram of the two possible "games" between Assad and the opposition (one with the ICC and one without). Assad can either choose to reject or accept the ultimatum. If he rejects, he either "wins" or "loses" in a confrontation with the opposition.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C3-B5DT70fw/T0w5Kg9WaHI/AAAAAAAAAHw/APio6Uaqsfo/s1600/ICCAssadGame1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="319" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-C3-B5DT70fw/T0w5Kg9WaHI/AAAAAAAAAHw/APio6Uaqsfo/s320/ICCAssadGame1.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />In the first case, assuming equal probability of winning and losing, Assad chooses to reject negotiation. In the second case, with the same assumption, Assad accepts.<br /><br />However, there are some flaws with this basic model. Namely, it ignores the commitment effect that&nbsp;following through on the ICC referral would create. By eliminating the option to flee, it essentially commits Assad to fighting the opposition to the end if he chooses to reject the offer. Observing this "forced" commitment, the opposition is faced with a choice - either back down or continue to challenge Assad, knowing that his regime has been backed into a corner. If the opposition is sufficiently risk-averse and worried about losing in a protracted conflict, they would likely reduce their protest activity (preferring to concede now rather than fight a futile struggle).<br /><br />You may notice that I'm again referencing James Hollyer and Peter Rosendorff's <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1876843">work</a> on why dictators sign the Convention Against Torture (also known as the "<a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2010/02/04/the_bad_ass_theory_of_why_dict/">badass theory of torture</a>").&nbsp;I think it applies rather well in this case. Hollyer and Rosendorff argue that dictators ratify CAT in order to credibly signal that they will fight any challenge that could remove them from their position. Since they engage in torture, and since the CAT has compulsory jurisdiction, ensuring that they will likely be prosecuted if they try to seek exile abroad, dictators give up the option of backing down and leaving power. Dictators show their willingness to repress at all costs, and, as a result, face fewer challenges from domestic opposition groups. ICC prosecution against Assad, if actually credible, could have a similar effect. The model below shows an expanded version of the previous game:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3YJDim3RQWQ/T0w5FrFIQfI/AAAAAAAAAHo/6GZuErBVnSY/s1600/ICCAssadGame2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="268" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3YJDim3RQWQ/T0w5FrFIQfI/AAAAAAAAAHo/6GZuErBVnSY/s320/ICCAssadGame2.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br />Here, I've added two more decisions interposed between Assad's acceptance or rejection of the ultimatum and the final outcome of the Assad/opposition conflict. After Assad rejects the ultimatum, the opposition has to choose whether to continue challenging the government (fight) or conceding (a rather simplified choice). If the opposition fights, Assad independently has the choice of whether to also fight or resign/flee. Essentially, this is an entry/deterrence game added into the previous model. Assad would prefer to win by concession rather than by fighting. The opposition also is assumed to prefer conceding to losing a massive fight. Also, assume that the probability of winning and losing are equal (for now).<br /><br />What happens when the threat of ICC prosecution is brought in? It essentially forecloses "fleeing" as an option for Assad. As long as there is some risk of winning a challenge, Assad will fight. As a result, the opposition cannot count on getting Assad to back down if challenged (its preferred option) and instead must risk a fight. If the expected value of Assad losing is less than the value of backing down, the opposition will likely reduce its pressure on the regime, which in turn gives Assad a strong incentive to reject.<br /><br />In the first model, given a 50-50 chance of winning, Assad will reject and flee. There is no scenario were he accepts since there is a non-zero chance that the opposition could back down and still a good chance that he could win a challenge. It's also assumed that Assad would prefer to leave on his own terms rather than those negotiated for him.<br /><br />In the second model, Assad could accept negotiation, but <i>only if</i>&nbsp;he has a high chance of losing were he to fight the opposition. Assuming than victory and defeat are equally likely (and that both actors have similar assessments of the likelihood of winning versus losing), the opposition in this model will back down (utility of 2 vs. expected value of 1.5 from fighting). If, given the somewhat arbitrary utilities I've created, the probability that the opposition "wins" a "fight" is greater than 67%, Assad <i>will</i> take the offer.<br /><br />Obviously these models are highly simplified and assume perfect knowledge of the other actors' capabilities/strategy. The utilities themselves, while somewhat reflective of the priorities of each actor, are arbitrary and likely poorly weighted. Nevertheless, the models do highlight an important caveat to Lynch's argument for threatening Assad's exit strategy. If the Syrian government thinks that it could still successfully repress the opposition were it to reject a negotiated settlement, then permanently closing off exit routes for government officials would <i>limit</i>&nbsp;options for further negotiation by pushing Assad towards a "survive-or-else" strategy. At best this weakens the credibility of such a threat since the United States may not follow through for fear of limiting future. At worst, it ensures prolonged bloodshed and violence if Assad chooses to reject negotiation.<br /><br />I think Lynch is right that threatening to cut off the Syrian regime's "golden parachute" can be an effective way of forcing a settlement, but it is a tactic to be used wisely and at a time when Assad would be most conducive to accepting. Moreover, it's unlikely that ICC prosecution will be significant enough of a threat since there are plenty of non-ratifiers which could possibly offer Assad and his coterie safe-haven (for example, Walter Russel Mead suggested Russia's <a href="http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/05/russias-syrian-bet-explained/">Black Sea coast </a>as the destination for a possible "getaway" vacation). <br /><br />But most importantly, such a policy must compliment other non-military efforts to tip the balance of domestic and international opinion against Assad. The other strategies that Lynch outlines are crucial to making it less likely that, if faced with an ultimatum, Assad will choose to accept the costs of rejection and opt to fight the opposition to the bitter end.Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-11087047915832299422012-02-13T13:17:00.000-08:002012-02-13T13:21:08.203-08:00Tweets vs. Likes? An Analysis of the Monkey CageA while back, Joshua Tucker <a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/01/30/tweets-and-likes/">issued a challenge</a> on The Monkey Cage:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Here at The Monkey Cage we allow people to “Tweet” posts to their Twitter followers, and “Like” posts to their Facebook friends. Lately I’ve noticed that some posts get more tweets than likes, some get more likes than tweets, and others get roughly the same amount. Anyone have any idea why?</blockquote>Challenge accepted.<br /><br />I was actually surprised to find that this question has already been looked at by other data science bloggers. A quick google search for "Tweets vs. Likes" got me to Edwin Chen's blog where he <a href="http://blog.echen.me/2011/07/28/tweets-vs-likes-what-gets-shared-on-twitter-vs-facebook/">posed&nbsp;</a>the exact same question as Joshua did:<br /><blockquote>It always strikes me as curious that some posts get a lot of love on Twitter, while others get many more shares on Facebook:<br /><br />What accounts for this difference? Some of it is surely site-dependent: maybe one blogger has a Facebook page but not a Twitter account, while another has these roles reversed. But even on sites maintained by a single author, tweet-to-likes ratios can vary widely from post to post.</blockquote>He analyzes the data from a few tech-related blogs, comparing the tweet-to-like ratio for each post to various post attributes&nbsp;and finds that:<br /><blockquote>tl;dr Twitter is still for the techies: articles where the number of tweets greatly outnumber FB likes tend to revolve around software companies and programming. Facebook, on the other hand, appeals to everyone else: yeah, to the masses, and to non-software technical folks in general as well.</blockquote>This nerd/normal divide corresponds surprisingly well to Joshua's initial set of hypotheses. <br /><blockquote><b>Humor vs. wonkishness hypothesis:</b> The funnier a post, the more likely it is to go on Facebook; the wonkier the post, the more likely it is to get tweeted.<br /><br /><b>The graphics hypothesis: </b>The more graphics, the more likely it is to go to Facebook. The more text, the more likely it is to be tweeted.<br /><br /><b>The source of visitors hypothesis:</b> Visitors outside academia are more likely to post to Facebook; academics who read blogs are more likely to tweet.</blockquote>Is this really the case? To obtain the actual data, I wrote a quick screen scraping script and went through all posts from this February up until about May of last year. At some point after that, no likes or tweets appear to be recorded for most of the posts.&nbsp;In total, I scraped around 860 posts, 492 of which had both tweets and likes.<br /><br />I use a modified version of Edwin Chen's tweet-to-like ratio as the dependent variable. In order to avoid dividing by zero since many posts have only tweets and no likes, I add 1 to the quantity of both tweets and likes for a given post. I then take the base-10 log of the modified tweet/like ratio to linearize the dependent variable for regression analysis. For brevity, let's call this measure the "tweet rating" - positive values indicate more tweets than likes while negative values indicate more likes than tweets.<br /><br />Since the third of Joshua's hypotheses is untestable with the data that I could obtain, I'll focus on the first two. Graphics and length are directly measurable. I use a dummy variable indicating whether or not a post includes a graphic (i.e. img tags) and another indicating whether a post has an embedded video. For length, I use only a basic word count measure. Since this may not capture the "complexity" of a post well, I also include the Flesch-Kinkaid grade level (a rather rough measure, but the best quantitative one that I could come up with quickly).<br /><br />Wonkiness vs. Humor is a bit harder to capture. While it would be interesting to do a full analysis of each post to determine the sentiment (using something like <a href="http://sentiwordnet.isti.cnr.it/">Sentiwordnet</a> and a natural language processor), I simply don't have the time. As a proxy, I use post categories. A lot of the categories are rather neutral but a few stand out as relevant in the nerd/normal framework. Frivolity and especially the Ted McCagg Cartoons are definitely more humor-oriented. Conversely, I found the "Data," "Academia," "Methodology," and "IT and Politics" categories more "wonky" than the rest. Each is coded as a 0-1 dummy variable.<br /><br /><a name='more'></a><br /><br />What's the relationship? Tables 1 and 2 (at the bottom of the post) give the results of 8 regressions with different combinations of the above variables.&nbsp;The results appear to be strongly supportive of Joshua's hypotheses. First, the presence of some sort of image has a highly significant negative effect (p &lt; .01) on the tweet rating. Put visually:<br /><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ddAAdZOJGQM/TzlrTdJ7beI/AAAAAAAAAHc/kiYNbfqmI2s/s1600/tweetratinggraphics.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ddAAdZOJGQM/TzlrTdJ7beI/AAAAAAAAAHc/kiYNbfqmI2s/s400/tweetratinggraphics.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Posts with graphics therefore tend to have a lower tweet/like ratio, indicating more popularity on Facebook. Length and Grade Level, however, do not appear to be significantly associated with the Tweet Rating (perhaps a more nuanced measure of wonkiness would be appropriate).<br /><br />The relationship between the categories and tweet factor also appear to support the nerd/normal story. When considered alone, the Frivolity and TMC Cartoon categories also have a significant negative effect on the tweet rating. Conversely, the Data and IT and Politics categories are associated with a higher tweet rating (although the Data category is only significant at the &lt; .10 level).<br /><br />This is certainly a very rough look at the data, but it does seem to suggest that Joshua's hypotheses have some validity. Posts that have graphics or are funny are more "likable" while wonkier posts are more "tweetable." I would add that the first relationship is a bit stronger than the second since its difficult to find a good measure of "wonkiness" (especially since almost <i>all </i>posts on the&nbsp;Monkey Cage are relatively wonky).&nbsp;That the more "tech" categories (Data and IT/Politics) had a positive effect on the Tweet Rating might lend support to Edwin Chen's argument that the Twitter ecosystem is geared specifically towards technology nerds.<br /><br />I'm not sure that the results say much about the composition of Facebook vs. Twitter - a lot of people use both. I do, however, think that they may hint at a key difference in the content-sharing incentives behind both services. Facebook is much more graphically-oriented than Twitter. The new "Timeline" profile structure makes this absolutely clear. Moreover, pictures and videos receive much more visual prominence in a user's Facebook feed than simple text. Therefore, there is a much greater chance that shared content will be noticed &nbsp;if it contains an eye-catching photo or graphic. Conversely, Twitter feeds are pure text, which means that graphics are not a means of distinguishing one's tweets from those of others. The value of graphics is greater on Facebook, which gives users a strong incentive to share content that has some visual component in order to get noticed.<br /><br />Certainly there are other possible explanations. Tweets tend to be more public than Facebook posts, which are aimed more at one's circle of known friends and acquaintances. Even if the bases of users for both services is similar, there may be a difference in the types of people who prefer to use Twitter vs. those who prefer Facebook (nerds vs. "normal people"?)<br /><br />It would be interesting to extend this to other political blogs to see if the relationship holds. Would policy-oriented blogs be different from academic blogs? Are certain authors more tweet-prone or like-prone? Interesting questions for anyone who has an excess of free time.<br /><br /><i>You can download the data I used for this post in <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/causalloops/home/finalMonkeyCageData.dta?attredirects=0&amp;d=1">STATA format</a> or in a <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/causalloops/home/finalMonkeyCageData.tab?attredirects=0&amp;d=1">tab-delimited</a> text file.</i><br /><br /><i>I obtained the data using a screen scraper written in Python. You can download it <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/causalloops/home/MonkeyCageScrape.py?attredirects=0&amp;d=1">here</a> along with the <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/causalloops/home/MonkeyCageTransform.py?attredirects=0&amp;d=1">conversion script</a> to make the results usable in statistical software. Hat tip to Ed Cranford for his <a href="http://www.slumberheart.com/things/flesch_kincaid.py">Flesch-Kinkaid score</a> calculator. Required additional libraries are <a href="http://www.nltk.org/">nltk</a>, <a href="http://pamie.sourceforge.net/">PAMIE</a> and <a href="http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/">BeautifulSoup</a>. I also have the full texts for each post in the data set which are available via e-mail request.</i><br /><br /><b>Appendix - Tables</b><br /><br /><b>Table 1 - Standard OLS regression of "Tweet Factor" on independent variables</b><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 363px;"><colgroup><col style="mso-width-alt: 5302; mso-width-source: userset; width: 109pt;" width="145"></col> <col style="mso-width-alt: 1865; mso-width-source: userset; width: 38pt;" width="51"></col> <col style="mso-width-alt: 2377; mso-width-source: userset; width: 49pt;" width="65"></col> <col span="2" style="mso-width-alt: 1865; mso-width-source: userset; width: 38pt;" width="51"></col> </colgroup><tbody><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt; width: 109pt;" width="145"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Independent Variable</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl71" style="width: 38pt;" width="51"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">1</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl71" style="width: 49pt;" width="65"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl71" style="width: 38pt;" width="51"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">3</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl71" style="width: 38pt;" width="51"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">4</span></b></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Graphics</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.1772***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.1760***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.1702***</span></td> <td class="xl65"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-5.05)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-5.01)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-4.80)</span></td> <td class="xl66"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Length</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td align="right" class="xl68"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.000032</span></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-1.12)</span></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Grade Level</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td align="right" class="xl68"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.003513</span></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(0.90)</span></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Frivolity</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.1063</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.1687**</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-1.27)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-2.02)</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">TMC Cartoon</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Data</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">IT and Politics</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Methodology</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Academia</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl70" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Constant</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.3157***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.2925***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.2768***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.2758***</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl70" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(17.68)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(6.88)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(17.47)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(17.40)</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl70" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Num. Observations</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl67"><span style="font-size: x-small;">860</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl67"><span style="font-size: x-small;">860</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl67"><span style="font-size: x-small;">860</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl67"><span style="font-size: x-small;">860</span></td></tr></tbody></table><i>T-values in parentheses. Significant at: * = .10, ** = .05, *** &lt; .01</i><br /><br /><b>Table 2 - Standard OLS regression of "Tweet Factor" on independent variables cont.</b><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 363px;"><colgroup><col style="mso-width-alt: 5302; mso-width-source: userset; width: 109pt;" width="145"></col> <col style="mso-width-alt: 1865; mso-width-source: userset; width: 38pt;" width="51"></col> <col style="mso-width-alt: 2377; mso-width-source: userset; width: 49pt;" width="65"></col> <col span="2" style="mso-width-alt: 1865; mso-width-source: userset; width: 38pt;" width="51"></col> </colgroup><tbody><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt; width: 109pt;" width="145"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Independent Variable</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl70" style="width: 38pt;" width="51"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">5</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl70" style="width: 49pt;" width="65"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">6</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl70" style="width: 38pt;" width="51"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">7</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl70" style="width: 38pt;" width="51"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">8</span></b></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Graphics</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.1798***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.1797***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.1843***</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-5.13)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-5.11)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-5.25)</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Length</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Grade Level</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Frivolity</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">TMC Cartoon</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.3588**</span></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-2.21)</span></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Data</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.2290*</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.2293*</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.2356*</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(1.75)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(1.75)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(1.80)</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">IT and Politics</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.2723**</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(2.40)</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Methodology</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.0476</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.0528</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(0.55)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(0.61)</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Academia</span></b></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td class="xl65"></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.0254</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.0201</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl68" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td class="xl66"></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-0.36)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-0.29)</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Constant</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.2731***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.3132***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.3128***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.3084***</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(17.48)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(17.50)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(16.79)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(16.52)</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl69" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Num. Observations</span></b></td> <td align="right" class="xl67"><span style="font-size: x-small;">860</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl67"><span style="font-size: x-small;">860</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl67"><span style="font-size: x-small;">860</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl67"><span style="font-size: x-small;">860</span></td> </tr></tbody></table><i>T-values in parentheses. Significant at: * = .10, ** = .05, *** &lt; .01</i><br /><div><br /></div>Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-87283495402042251482012-02-08T22:09:00.000-08:002012-02-09T11:57:05.340-08:00Russian Politics Part 2: The UNSC VetoIn the wake of the failure of the UN Security Council resolution condemning the Syrian government, analysts have offered up a variety of reasons behind the Russian and Chinese decisions to veto. Erik Voeten posted a succinct<a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/02/06/why-did-russia-and-china-veto/"> summary</a> two days ago and followed up yesterday with an<a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/02/07/how-libya-did-and-did-not-affect-the-security-council-vote-on-syria/"> extended rebuttal</a> to the Libya "precedent" made by a number of <a href="http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/02/06/the_libyan_precedent">writers</a> and <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/syria-and-the-pernicious-consequences-of-our-libya-intervention/252631/">bloggers</a>. I agree that perceived NATO overreach in Libya is a very weak story for why Russia and China vetoed. The Russian government's suggestion that it was "duped" by the text of the UNSC's resolution on Libya is highly specious given its generally&nbsp;<i>realpolitik</i>&nbsp;foreign policy.&nbsp;Erik elaborates on this further in the post. I would add that Russia's behavior with regards to arms control - the fact that it has consistently sought <i>binding</i>&nbsp;over <i>non-binding</i>&nbsp;nuclear reductions agreements (START vs. SORT) - also shows that it certainly does not attach much importance to unenforceable declarations.<br /><br />The rest of the blogosphere has more or less finished dissecting both countries' general motivations for opposing both the resolution and any substantive action against Assad. However, I am more interested in the possible domestic dimension behind the veto, an explanation that has been thrown around but not developed much. I know less about Chinese internal politics, so I'll focus on Russia.<br /><br />There have been a few explanations offered for why the Russian government had some sort of domestic political interest in vetoing the resolution and all are general variations on a theme: Putin and his cohort are facing increasing pressures on their political survival and the Syria veto sends a signal that benefits them vis-a-vis opposition forces.<br /><br />Walter Russell Mead <a href="http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/02/05/russias-syrian-bet-explained/">suggests </a>that the veto is meant to boost Putin's reputation as a hardliner, look good domestically, and co-opt the increasingly agitated ultra-nationalists:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">First point: domestic politics. Putin is running for reelection, and although the clueless MSM (the ones who thought the Egyptian revolution was all about liberals and tweeting) instinctively sees the issue as a contest between Putin and liberals, the opposition that worries him is on the right. They are ultra-nationalists and fascists steeped in crazy-think conspiracy theories and full of fear and hate.</blockquote>I mentioned <a href="http://www.causalloop.blogspot.com/2012/01/domestic-crisis-politics-of-russian.html">two weeks ago</a> that Putin is likely to continue ratcheting up his confrontational rhetoric in the run-up to the Presidential elections (with the caveat that I was also skeptical as to how effective it will be). Certainly there's a logic behind the "tough talk," but I think Mead is conflating the rhetoric with the policy here. &nbsp;Putin doesn't need the veto in order to bash the West. As in the Libya case, Russia could have abstained while continuing to voice its objections to interventionism. Any reputational costs that would have resulted from failing to stand up to a "NATO intervention" would have been negligible as it's clear that the likelihood that Western powers will independently use force against Syria is very low (compared to Libya). Certainly the &nbsp;veto helps the spin, but it is in no way essential given the Kremlin's vast media resources.<br /><br />More importantly though, Mead also overstates the extent to which<i>&nbsp;</i>those nationalists dissatisfied with Putin <i>care</i>&nbsp;about the government's foreign policy. As Igor Torbakov noted in <a href="http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64975">a post</a> on EurasiaNet, the nationalists that would be attracted to such shows of strength are already squarely in the government's camp. The ones that pose a threat to Putin are the <i>cultural</i>&nbsp;nationalists who are already staunch anti-statists.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Nationalism in Russia has undergone a dramatic shift lately, one that Putin, apparently, has been slow to catch on to. Two competing strains of nationalism have always existed in the country – one that can be described as imperial, or statist nationalism, the other ethno-cultural. The first worshipped the state, its power and international prestige; the second glorified the nation, its culture and faith. Throughout Russian history, statists have tended to hold a pragmatic view of nationalism, seeing it mostly as an instrument to strengthen state institutions and bolster the authority of the ruling class. As such, statists have traditionally favored territorial expansion, followed by efforts to assimilate minority groups.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Radical ethnic nationalists, on the other hand, see no place for non-Russians in the state. This strain of nationalism, naturally, has caused particular problems for imperialists, whether they have been Russian tsars, Soviet commissars or Putinists advocating “managed democracy” and relying on energy policy to expand their influence in the near abroad.</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">In recent years, economic hardship has boosted the popularity of ethnic nationalism at the expense of the imperial variety. This trend is underscored by the growing popularity of the slogan “Russia for the Russians.” Putin, who clearly aligns himself with the imperial school, has been reluctant to acknowledge this trend. Instead, he has tended to oversimplify the rise of ethnic nationalists, casting them as trouble-makers whose ideas could encourage the disintegration of the Russian Federation.</blockquote>In essence, the Syria veto would only "boost" Putin's popularity among those Russians who already accept his &nbsp;tough foreign policy credentials and therefore, are already likely supporters.When it comes to getting the nationalist vote, Putin has either done enough (in the case of the "statist" nationalists) or can simply do nothing.<br /><br />So I'm unconvinced by the popularity argument since it seems to only explain the rhetoric and not the policy. But what if the goal is not to gain popularity, but simply to show strength? Facing an increasingly vocal protest movement, Putin may be seeking to dissuade additional protesters by signalling his staunch commitment to staying in power, whatever the costs. Assisting a leader who is actively repressing protesters may be a veiled threat to the Russian opposition that similar actions will be taken by the government if their protests go to far. &nbsp;Michael Weiss and Julia Pettengill made this argument last week in <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/02/brothers_in_arms?page=0,0">Foreign Policy</a>:<br /><blockquote>These demonstrations, coupled with the general weariness at the decline of living standards and increasing state corruption, have raised the possibility that Putin may not secure a majority in the first round of voting, a contingency he has acknowledged as possible -- though it would no doubt be politically disastrous for him and his ruling United Russia party. As a consequence, Putin is attempting to shore up his reputation as an unyielding strongman abroad to detract from the increasing perception of weakness at home.<br /><br />Putin has not had a significant foreign policy standoff since the 2008 Russian-Georgian War, which was billed as an effort to reclaim Russia's "near abroad" from creeping Western and NATO influence. He opposed, but did not veto, the Security Council's authorization of a NATO-imposed no-fly zone in Libya last year. He now appears to be compensating for that acquiescence by backing a friendly tyrant and showing a wobbly electorate that Russia won't be pushed around by American and European democracy-promoters.</blockquote>On face this makes sense and may indeed be part of the Putin government's reasoning behind vetoing the UN resolution and backing Assad. However, it too is a poor explanation for the simple fact that supporting a foreign government does very little to make its threats against the protesters more credible. At best it's just more costless talk - it doesn't actually make it more difficult for Putin to concede to protest demands.<br /><br />James Hollyer and Peter Rosendorff's research on&nbsp;why autocracies that practice torture ratify the Convention Against Torture (CAT) is particularly relevant here. Their theory is that dictators want to convince domestic opposition movements that they will not resign from power without a fight, thereby decreasing the expected benefit to protests and lessening their number. The "badass" theory of torture (to use <a href="http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jrv24/">James Vreeland'</a>s phrase) suggests that autocrats use foreign policy tools to constrain themselves in order to make their threats more credible. They can certainly talk tough, but protesters have no reason to believe them, so leaders must make an actual commitment. This is where the CAT comes in. By signing the CAT and then proceeding to torture, leaders signal that they have no easy escape route once faced with protests. They can't resign and flee to an Italian villa because the CAT's principle of universal jurisdiction ensures that they will face prosecution upon losing power. The goal is to show protesters that there is no conceivable way that they can win short of a massive, protracted fight, thus deterring protests from developing in the first place.<br /><br />So does Putin look more like a "badass" after the veto? Not really. Maybe supporting Assad creates some reputational costs for backing down, but that's true of all of the aggressive rhetoric being issued from the Kremlin. Putin is certainly committed to supporting Assad, especially given the extensive economic and political ties between Russia and Syria, but as far as Russian protesters are concerned, this does not increase the actual likelihood that Putin will crackdown on protesters. The government is no more committed to repress now than it would be if it had not backed Assad. There is no new <i>credible</i>&nbsp;threat.<br /><br />This is not to discount the potential for costless threats to be meaningful. Backing Assad certainly makes Putin <i>look</i>&nbsp;like a tougher leader, even if there's no substantive reason to believe that he is. Polling done in December by <a href="http://www.levada.ru/28-12-2011/rossiyane-ob-aktsiyakh-protesta-i-proshedshikh-vyborakh">the Levada Center</a> suggests that the message may be working. 43% of respondents think that the government will do everything in its power to avoid a recount of the Duma elections while only 17% believe the government will accede to the protesters demands. Moreover, 43% of respondents think that protesters should back down if the government turns to tougher measures to crush the protests while only 16% think that protests should continue. Its important to also note the large number of respondents who are "unsure" - 40 and 41 percent in both polls. While it's unclear how these individuals would answer if pressed further, the early polling does show that a significant number of Russians think that the government is likely to <i>increase</i>&nbsp;its repressive measures against protesters&nbsp;<i>and </i>that protesters should subsequently back down - precisely the deterrent effect that the government wants. However, its obviously impossible to determine whether Syria factored into the public's reasoning, and given how little attention Russians paid to Libya, it may be safe to say its influence was rather small. <br /><br />Ultimately, I am skeptical that domestic politics played a key role in the decision to back Syria. Or more specifically, there may be domestic incentives to support Assad, but increasing Putin's popularity or showing strength to the opposition are relatively minor. The real "domestic politics" explanation for Russia's backing of the Syria government likely has more to do with the commercial interests of those with strong ties to the Kremlin. Syria is one of the last remaining dedicated clients of the Russian arms export industry. Moreover, Russian companies have concluded an extensive series of oil and gas contracts with Syrian state energy enterprises. For example, Stroytransgaz, which recently <a href="http://www.stroytransgaz.com/press-center/news/2011/11/09">renegotiated</a> its contract with the Syrian Gas Company, is<a href="http://rusmergers.com/en/mna/440-.html"> owned </a>by Gennady Timchenko, one of the key "new oligarchs" <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c3c5c012-21e9-11dd-a50a-000077b07658.html#axzz1lqT7MtJ2">connected</a> to Putin. Vetoing the UNSC resolution may simply be good backroom politics, but I'm doubtful that Putin's Syria strategy will have much effect on the ongoing opposition protests.Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-54591825550124125272012-02-01T12:20:00.000-08:002012-02-01T12:20:23.489-08:00Cheap Talk, Real Deterrence?<a href="http://scholar.harvard.edu/dtingley/biocv">Dustin Tingley</a> and <a href="http://irps.ucsd.edu/faculty/faculty-directory/barbara-walter.htm">Barbara Walter</a> have an interesting <a href="http://jcr.sagepub.com/content/55/6/996.abstract">article</a> in the latest issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution on using controlled experiments to analyze the role of "cheap talk" in conflict deterrence situations. Here's the abstract:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">What effect does cheap talk have on behavior in an entry-deterrence game? We shed light on this question using incentivized laboratory experiments of the strategic interaction between defenders and potential entrants. Our results suggest that cheap talk can have a substantial impact on the behavior of both the target and the speaker. By sending costless threats to potential entrants, defenders are able to deter opponents in early periods of play. Moreover, after issuing threats, defenders become more eager to fight. We offer a number of different explanations for this behavior. These results bring fresh evidence about the potential importance of costless verbal communication to the field of international relations.</blockquote>The model itself posits a "defender" who is confronted with a series of possible "entrants" who must choose whether to challenge or not challenge the defender. This defender then decides whether to fight the "entrant" or concede. The balance of incentives for fighting vs. acquiescing is determined by whether the defender is a "strong" or a "weak" type. "Strong" defenders would prefer to fight a challenge while "weak" ones benefit more from accepting it. However, the type is randomly assigned and unknown to the entrant. The defender's <i>actions</i>&nbsp;reveal the type to the entrants in successive rounds (entrants know how a defender reacted in previous rounds when other entrants chose to challenge), but in early rounds the type is largely unknown. Therefore, a weak defendant may have an incentive to fight early in order to signal a "strong" type to future entrants and deter those challenges.<br /><br />Tingley and Walter add into the game the possibility for "cheap talk" - private communication between the defender and entrant. Defenders could send a message that they will either fight or not fight if challenged before the entrant makes their decision. Both types of games (talk vs. no talk) were played out by a group of test subjects - conveniently available undergraduates.<br /><br />Despite the prediction that communication should not alter the game since preferences remain static and talk itself should not reveal anything about whether the defender is strong or weak since all types of defenders have an incentive to bluff, Tingley and Walter find that talk has a deterrent effect in early rounds. That is, when entrants lack reliable information about the defender's type, they appear to be dissuaded by costless threats alone. The effect disappears in later rounds as entrants get more information about the defender. Surprisingly, the results also suggest that talk has a slight deterrent effect <i>even when</i>&nbsp;a defender has revealed weakness by not fighting a challenge.&nbsp;Even more interesting is the finding that in early rounds, weak defenders who issued a threat and previously not backed down were more likely to follow through with the threat if challenged (which is unexpected if not following through imposes no costs).<br /><br />The authors suggest a signalling explanation. In the game, the participants are unsure of whether their opponents will understand how to play the game. Cheap talk can be a way of confirming that a player does indeed know how the game works thereby "deterring" opponents from exploiting information asymmetries. Early threats are expected since both sides know the defender wants to signal strength and will likely follow through in early rounds to deter future challengers. If a defender does not threaten, then they are signalling less competence and therefore inviting a possible challenge. This explains both why entrants pay attention to threats (since they reveal something about the games-playing ability of the defender) and why defenders follow through (both are associated with competence since more capable weak defenders understand that fighting early and taking a loss can benefit as a signal to future challengers).&nbsp;Essentially, its not that cheap talk itself&nbsp;<i>deters</i>, but rather that its absence may suggest a defender that does not fully understand the game.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Given that a threat is costless, a defender who threatens early in the game is playing&nbsp;exactly as one would expect him or her to play. Likewise, a player who does not&nbsp;issue a threat may be indicating that he or she does not fully understand the game.&nbsp;Thus, sending a threat or not sending a threat signals to the challenger something&nbsp;about the sophistication of the defender. (1010).</blockquote>The model provides an explanation for the prevalence of "cheap talk" among international actors. Costless threats are assumed to exist and thus are conspicuous when absent. Even in inter-state disputes, where actors are likely to already be well-informed about the other's nature (via intelligence gathering), cheap threats remain ubiquitous. For example, Iran's threat to shut down the Strait of Hormuz in response to sanctions is <i>expected</i>&nbsp;even if the action itself would be irrational<i>. </i>Although following through would be too costly, signalling the option shows that Iranian leadership is playing the deterrence game rationally, that is, it will try to show strength for as long as possible.<br /><br />However, I think the Tingley and Walter model is most applicable in situations where there is a true "low-information environment." Protest movements against autocrats are one such example. Why do dictators like to "talk tough"? The model suggests that they <i>must</i>&nbsp;do so in order to avoid showing incompetence. Let's assume that autocratic leaders want to deter protesters from protesting. Conversely, protesters must decide whether to challenge the regime or stay quiet, and this choice depends on how intensely they think the leader will fight them. "Strong" type leaders will choose to fight while weak ones will "acquiesce." However, the information asymmetry in such authoritarian states is highly pronounced - protesters find it difficult to determine whether their leader is a strong or a weak type (because of media control, lack of political networks, etc...) and discover this only through the government's reaction to protests. Likewise, both sides are also unsure about how well the other will play the "game." There is a potential difference in expertise. Therefore leaders may send signals of toughness simply because they are expected to do everything they can to say "I will fight" in a costless fashion. Failing to do so reveals an imperfect player (a weak leader who doesn't try to hide it) and suggests the possibility that a leader may back down when faced with a protest.<br /><br />The first related example that came to mind were the post-election protests in Russia. In a <a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2011/12/09/noncompetitve-elections-and-information-a-theoretical-perspective-on-the-2011-russian-elections/">blog post</a> at the Monkey Cage, Andrew Little hinted at a similar logic behind the persistence of election fraud. If everyone knows the results are falsified, why bother falsifying? He argues that <i>because</i>&nbsp;fraud is expected, lack of fraud can be a signal of weakness to protesters. Likewise the bluster coming from the Kremlin (which I discussed last week) is certainly just talk, but it is also expected - it shows that the Russian government <i>knows</i>&nbsp;that it must appear as a "strong" type rather than a "weak" type.<br /><br />On an even more extreme end, the model might explain the persistence of the North Korean personality cult and the speed at which elites tried to build up the image of Kim Jong Un. If leaders want to deter challengers and show strength, then <i>even if </i>no one believes the propaganda, it still has a purpose. It confirms that the leadership will continue acting in a manner that <i>projects</i>&nbsp;a strong type even if the regime is itself weak. It also might explain the increasing absurdity of North Korean propaganda efforts. If Kim Jong Il's personality cult was at a "10," then Kim Jong Un must crank it up to "11" or risk revealing weakness.<br /><br />Certainly all of these cases are imperfect applications of the model. Indeed, in the real world, it is difficult to isolate the effects of "costless" talk from other phenomena that may be unobservable. Talk in the aforementioned scenarios is also more public than private and therefore not entirely costless. Despite these and other differences between the model and its application, I think Tingley and Walter make an interesting point in providing a rational basis for ostensibly meaningless actions. Even if no one believes cheap talk, everyone expects that it will exist simply due to the lack of any consequences. Refraining from cheap talk suggests that an actor is not playing the game as efficiently as they could be (a revelation that <i>is</i>&nbsp;particularly meaningful).<br /><br />I was also intrigued by the method that Tingley and Walter used in light of Brad Smith's <a href="http://rationaliguana.blogspot.com/2012/01/towards-experimental-research-in-ir.html">recent post</a> on the dearth controlled experiments in IR research. My sense is that although it is difficult to make the jump directly from undergrads to states, lab experiments can be a good first step in testing a new and possibly counterintuitive model. Here I think an experimental approach was effective since it is almost impossible to isolate the effects of communication in an observational study. Finding the "ideal" case of entirely private and entirely costless talk in the "wild" is a difficult task, especially when there is no clear starting point. The experimental approach is certainly nowhere near conclusive, but it does help define the initial parameters for an observational study. To use the Rumsfeldian theory of knowledge, there are a lot of "unknown unknowns" in IR, things that we cannot even begin to test observationally because we do not know where to start. Lab experiments can help convert those into "known unknowns." &nbsp;That is, we can isolate an effect in a controlled study, so we "know" that it might exist, but cannot yet find a good example in real-world observation. From there it is a matter of finding cases that roughly fit the ideal type and varying some of the initial constraints (public vs. private talk, zero cost vs. near-zero cost) to figure out whether the model remains applicable. Truly controlled experiments are certainly fun and awesome, but my sense is that they are only the initial step to more rigorous real-world testing.Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-24267999787699100552012-01-24T13:36:00.000-08:002012-01-25T12:38:23.652-08:00The Domestic Crisis Politics of Russian Foreign Policy Rhetoric<div class="tr_bq">NYT <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/world/in-russia-new-us-envoy-mcfaul-ruffles-feathers.html">reports</a> that the Russian media's reaction to the arrival of Michael McFaul, President Obama's new ambassador, has been remarkably virulent.</div><blockquote>In the annals of American diplomacy, few honeymoons have been shorter than the one granted to Michael A. McFaul , who arrived in Russia on Jan. 14 as the new American ambassador.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>It was toward the end of his second full day on the job when a commentator on state-controlled Channel 1 suggested during a prime-time newscast that Mr. McFaul was sent to Moscow to foment revolution. A columnist for the newspaper Izvestia chimed in the next day, saying his appointment marked a return to the 18th century, when “an ambassador’s participation in intrigues and court conspiracies was ordinary business.”</blockquote>This is only the most recent of the vocal attacks on U.S. "interventionism" that have been coming from the Kremlin over the past year, and particularly in the months leading up to the Duma and Presidential elections. PM Putin's suggestion that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/world/europe/putin-accuses-clinton-of-instigating-russian-protests.html">was responsible</a> for the December protests, President Medvedev's<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15857431"> threat </a>to move Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad in response to US missile defense plans, and the Kremlin's<a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/russia_warns_over_nato_intervention_in_libya/24215871.html"> persistent criticism</a> of perceived NATO overreach in the Libya operation all illustrate a pattern of increased verbal hostility towards Washington.<br /><br />The official and semi-official rhetoric appears to be outpacing both reality and actual Russian policy. Certainly calling <a href="http://iis-db.stanford.edu/staff/2165/Michael_McFaul-CV.pdf">Ambassador McFaul</a> "not a Russia expert" is stretching the bounds of language itself. But despite suggestions that the Kremlin's increasingly harsh tone signals the end of the "reset," the incentives for cooperation remain strong in key areas. Indeed, the Libya case reveals that the Russian government is perfectly capable of both rhetorically opposing and substantively accepting U.S. action. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher is likewise sanguine about Russian missile defense rhetoric:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">In a November speech, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev suggested talks had broken down and he threatened several retaliatory measures, including Russia's potential withdrawal from the New START nuclear reductions agreement.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Tauscher responded that these statements were part of the Russian campaign season and that progress would speed up once the March Presidential elections in Russia had subsided. She also acknowledged that the Russians are demanding a legally binding document from the Obama administration promising U.S. missile defenses in Europe will not impact Russia's strategic deterrent, which Tauscher said they will never get.</blockquote>So the recent surge in confrontational rhetoric appears to be primarily a reaction to domestic political developments.&nbsp;It is reasonable to expect that the Kremlin, facing flagging popularity and an increasingly vocal public opposition, will try to leverage the traditional bogeymen of NATO and Western interventionism more broadly as a means of consolidating support. However, I am skeptical regarding whether this will <i>actually</i>&nbsp;be effective.<br /><br />What accounts for the rise and fall of public support for the Russian leadership over the past 10 years? The traditional "story" behind Vladimir Putin's surging popularity over the 2000s is that it was fueled by strong economic growth on the basis of high oil prices. This graph shows the correlation between Putin's monthly approval ratings (<a href="http://www.russiavotes.org/president/presidency_performance_trends.php#190">as gathered by the Levada Center</a>) and the spot price for Brent oil lagged by 2 months <a href="http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_spt_s1_m.htm">(obtained from the Energy Information Administration</a>) for the years 2000 to 2010.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oWbRa4DFs44/Tx8IwkaIpII/AAAAAAAAAG8/hgQWRUqiALM/s1600/graph1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oWbRa4DFs44/Tx8IwkaIpII/AAAAAAAAAG8/hgQWRUqiALM/s320/graph1.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />Indeed, higher oil prices, which serve as a good proxy for Russian economic performance overall given how crucial the oil sector is to the economy, tend to be associated with higher approval levels (r = .5531). However, when you add 2011, the relationship begins to break down. The graph below adds in the ratings for 2011 - highlighted in red.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--bFKRtHEDo8/Tx8KAj9q4zI/AAAAAAAAAHE/ofmka5XpLg4/s1600/graph2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--bFKRtHEDo8/Tx8KAj9q4zI/AAAAAAAAAHE/ofmka5XpLg4/s320/graph2.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />Despite the recovery in oil prices after the 2008 crash, Putin's approval rating has plunged below 70% (levels not seen since the months after the Ukrainian Orange Revolution).&nbsp;The link between oil and popularity has become much weaker (r = 0.2576).<br /><br />Why is this so? Consider a third factor - Russian attitudes towards the United States - a somewhat general proxy for pro-western/anti-western sentiment. The next graph shows the monthly U.S. disapproval rating (as provided by Levada Center) against Putin's monthly approval rating:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TaU0ShtYmik/TyBoLOG4elI/AAAAAAAAAHU/aw_OI5JCN_w/s1600/graph4.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TaU0ShtYmik/TyBoLOG4elI/AAAAAAAAAHU/aw_OI5JCN_w/s320/graph4.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />There does appear to be a relatively strong relationship between negative opinions of the U.S. and positive opinions of Putin (r =&nbsp;0.5306). Moreover, the data from 2011 actually fits the trend - recent polls have indicated that Russians have a much more positive attitude toward the United States than in previous years. Does this mean that Putin's popularity stems more from his government's ability to frame the "West" as a threat and generate a "rally 'round the flag" effect than Russia's economic growth? Probably no. The correlation may simply indicate that low levels of popularity mean that the public is less willing to "buy" the government's foreign policy rhetoric (i.e. the relationship goes the other way). It may also suggest a third variable that correlates with both - something like "trust in government." If it is relatively low now (as the protests may suggest), then boisterous foreign policy rhetoric is less likely to be taken seriously. Indeed,<a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/85dd8e96-1c2d-11e1-9631-00144feabdc0.html"> the decline in the popularity of television </a>and the rise of the internet may be cutting into the credibility of the Kremlin's traditional anti-U.S. messaging strategy.<br /><br />It may be that the two narratives behind Putin's popularity, the economic growth story and the "enemies abroad" story, are intertwined. The ability of the Putin/Medvedev government to benefit politically from economic growth rests on whether or not the public accepts the linkage between the economy and the government's actions - that is, that the government <i>deserves</i>&nbsp;credit for the improvement in living standards. This only happens when the public generally sees the government's messaging as credible. Public opinion of the United States may therefore be a proxy measure of how much the public believes the Kremlin's narrative generally, particularly since the growth and foreign policy messages are often mixed (Putin has tended to link Russia's economic resurgence to its "sovereign democracy" and its "regained" influence and independence on the international stage). In this case, there may be an interaction between the two variables - high levels of growth (oil prices) translate into higher levels of support for Putin <i>if</i>&nbsp;U.S. disapproval is also high.<br /><br />The table below gives the results of a series of linear regressions with approval rating as the dependent variable:<br /><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; text-align: center; width: 400px;"><colgroup><col style="mso-width-alt: 6985; mso-width-source: userset; width: 143pt;" width="191"></col> <col style="mso-width-alt: 2633; mso-width-source: userset; width: 54pt;" width="72"></col> <col span="3" style="mso-width-alt: 3766; mso-width-source: userset; width: 77pt;" width="103"></col> </colgroup><tbody><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td class="xl63" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt; width: 143pt;" width="191"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Independent Variable</span></b></td> <td class="xl63" style="width: 54pt;" width="72"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>1 - no</b> <b>2011</b></span></td> <td class="xl63" style="width: 77pt;" width="103"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">2 - include 2011</span></b></td> <td class="xl63" style="width: 77pt;" width="103"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">3 - include 2011</span></b></td> <td class="xl63" style="width: 77pt;" width="103"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">4 - include 2011</span></b></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td></td> <td></td> <td></td> <td></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Lagged DV</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.6064***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.7399***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.7346***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.7240***</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(8.83)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(12.55)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(9.40)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(9.35)</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Brent Oil Price - Lag 2 Mo.</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.0519***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.0142</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.0024</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.0678</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(3.51)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(1.25)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(0.16)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-1.55)</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">U.S. Disapproval</span></td> <td class="xl64"></td> <td class="xl64"></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.1297**</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">-0.0080</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl64"></td> <td class="xl64"></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(2.35)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(-0.08)</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Interaction Effect</span></td> <td class="xl64"></td> <td class="xl64"></td> <td class="xl64"></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.0020*</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl64"></td> <td class="xl64"></td> <td class="xl64"></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(1.71)</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Constant</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">27.3272***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">18.8144***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">15.2262***</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><span style="font-size: x-small;">20.7430***</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(5.59)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(4.32)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(2.85)</span></td> <td align="right" class="xl65"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(3.35)</span></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Adjusted R^2</span></i></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.5680</span></i></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.5639</span></i></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.6640</span></i></td> <td align="right" class="xl64"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">0.6727</span></i></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"></td> <td class="xl64"></td> <td class="xl64"></td> <td class="xl64"></td> <td class="xl64"></td> </tr><tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> <td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Num. of observations</span></i></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">126</span></i></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">137</span></i></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">76</span></i></td> <td align="right" class="xl66"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">76</span></i></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">T-values in parentheses. * = 90% significance, ** = 95% significance, *** = 99%+ significance</span></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I included a lagged dependent variable in each regression to account for autocorrelation. The first three regressions generally confirm the argument made in the previous graphs - approval rating correlates with both oil prices and U.S. disapproval through 2001-2010 but U.S. disapproval is the better predictor when including 2011. However, regression number four is interesting. The interaction effect is significant and positive at the 90% level, giving some <i>limited </i>support to the above hypothesis.&nbsp;</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Of course the "story time" part of this analysis is getting far ahead of the data - 90% significance is a relatively low bar and the accuracy of many of the proxies and assumptions that I'm using is questionable. Oil prices may not be the best measure of economic performance (per capita income is likely better, though I was unable to find monthly data). Moreover, the size of the sample is tiny and plagued with missing data. Nevertheless, this is a blog post and the initial results do suggest some interesting speculation/avenues for further research.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">While I expect that the Russian government will continue its rhetoric over "U.S. interventionism," I highly doubt that it will have any significant effect on either Russian citizens' approval of the United States or of the government/Putin/Medvedev. It is difficult to make any meaningful predictions about the future of the opposition protests or the survival of the Putin/Medvedev tandem after the presidential elections. However, the data do suggest that the government is in trouble - it can no longer rely on a steady stream of oil income to assure public support. In fact, that "support" <b>was hollow to begin with</b> and confrontational showmanship is unlikely to bring it back. Stephen Holmes' <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n01/stephen-holmes/fragments-of-a-defunct-state">recent piece</a> in the London Review of Books summarizes this sentiment quite succinctly:</div><blockquote>Some of the time, at least, rulers become fleetingly popular because they are believed to wield power. From the predictable tendency of opportunistic citizens to flock obsequiously to the power-wielders of the day it follows that an incumbent who seems to be losing power may see his poll-tested ‘popularity’ vanish overnight.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote>This is the nightmare now faced by Putin’s team. Keen to avoid any appearance of weakness, they are well aware that public support can be artificially inflated by the illusion of power. They have long depended on theatrical displays which, however easy to stage, gave spectators an outsize sense of what the government could achieve...Can an internally warring, socially detached and rapacious oligarchy hold onto power with only a minimum use of violence now that such electoral fakery seems to have outlived its usefulness?</blockquote><i>Edit 1/25: Fixed the title on the third graph</i>Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-30938703411516127052012-01-18T19:11:00.000-08:002012-01-18T19:11:29.381-08:00SOPA: Or the Fight Between NorCal and SoCal<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mav6J8UwjFk/TxeJrKhu2jI/AAAAAAAAAG0/7ec6221YTS4/s1600/SOPACalifornia.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mav6J8UwjFk/TxeJrKhu2jI/AAAAAAAAAG0/7ec6221YTS4/s400/SOPACalifornia.png" width="373" /></a></div><br />Created using <a href="http://www.google.com/fusiontables/Home/">Google Fusion Tables</a><br /><br />Interestingly, Issa and Campbell (districts 48 and 49) deviate from the pattern.Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4764354931517518128.post-53042781601865247652012-01-17T21:34:00.000-08:002012-01-17T21:44:56.616-08:00Hungary: International Institutions and Democracy?The New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/world/europe/hungary-is-pressed-on-democracy.html">reports</a> that the EU appears to be responding to some of the recent highly contentious laws adopted by the Hungarian government<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Reawakening a debate on what the European Union should do when one of its members threatens its democratic principles, the bloc’s executive arm opened legal proceedings on Tuesday against Hungary, which critics contend is sliding toward authoritarianism.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">It had been more than 10 years since the union faced a similar dilemma, when an Austrian coalition government included a far-right party. Austria was forced into semi-isolation when the bloc’s other countries severed political ties.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">The government of Hungary, by contrast, is being taken to task on technicalities rather than the wider claims that it is undermining democracy, centralizing power and destroying pluralism.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">On Tuesday, the European Commission, the union’s executive arm, said it was starting proceedings over Hungarian measures that threaten the independence of the country’s central bank and its data-protection authority, and over rules on the retirement age of judges. Ultimately, Hungary can be forced to change rules that breach European law or, if it refuses, can be taken to the European Court of Justice.</blockquote>Joshua Tucker over at The Monkey Cage <a href="http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/01/09/a-new-solidarity-movement-in-hungary/">recently covered</a> the massive controversy over the conservative Fidesz party's move to introduce a new constitution that many argue consolidates too much power in the hands of the ruling administration and moves Hungary in an increasingly undemocratic direction. While a number of EU leaders have openly decried the new constitution, the Times article points out that the European Commission is currently focusing on a narrow and largely technical subset of the controversial package of laws, mostly with regards to central bank and judicial independence. Certainly the EU has the authority to levy Article 7 sanctions (which include fines and the suspension of voting rights) against Hungary for many more of the anti-democratic provisions in the new constitution. However, given current political tensions within Europe, it appears that the European Commission is treading carefully (although according to the Telegraph&nbsp;EC officials have hinted that these initial complaints are just the "<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9021423/Hungary-faces-ruin-as-EU-loses-patience.html">tip of the iceberg</a>"). Will the EU then continue to put pressure on Hungary to reverse more of its anti-democratic laws if Hungary relents on the three currently in dispute? Moreover, would a rebuke by the EU be politically damaging enough to the Fidesz party to give the opposition a chance to sweep them out of office or is their current supermajority resilient enough to survive a conflict with the Union?<br /><br />More generally though, how good are international organizations at promoting and consolidating democracy? Jon Pevehouse (<a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3088403">gated</a>)(<a href="http://iis-db.stanford.edu/evnts/5268/cddrl_2.pdf">ungated</a>) argues that membership in international institutions that have a large proportion of democratic states - a high "democratic density" - can help stabilize democracies and check potential rollbacks. Regional institutions that share common democratic interests can impose external costs on leaders that follow undemocratic policies by restricting access to the benefits of membership. Perhaps the most recent example of such pressure was the Organization of American States' decision to suspend the membership of Honduras after that country's leader, Manuel Zelaya, was deposed in a coup in 2009. The OAS <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-13622939">reinstated</a> Honduras' membership in 2011 after Zelaya was allowed to return from exile.<br /><br />Pevehouse suggests that international organizations that have the political will to coordinate on conditions for membership and to enforce these conditions (i.e. organizations with members that have common goals) will be better able to generate penalties for anti-democratic behavior as they can make more credible threats. Regional organizations (which tend to be more valued due to their proximity) that are highly democratic (and thereby able to coordinate on promoting democracy) therefore tend to be the most effective at punishing states that take anti-democratic actions.<br /><br />Certainly the European Union is an example of such an organization so one can expect the actions of the EC to be taken very seriously by Fidesz. Moreover, the fact that Hungary's leaders have been lobbying the EU for an economic rescue package to boost the country's flagging economy gives the union&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-12/hungary-economy-shows-strength-as-cabinet-seeks-bailout-loan-orban-says.html">even more leverage</a>&nbsp;in enforcing conditions. However, in the short term, conditionality can only go so far. While the reversal of the small set of policies isolated by the EC may be a concession the Hungarian government is willing to make, how many more changes can the EU demand before its threats are no longer credible?<br /><br />Perhaps the more relevant question is whether a policy reversal on the part of Fidesz will also weaken the party in future elections. The literature on "audience costs" and interstate bargaining (i.e. Fearon, 1994) argues that democratic leaders who back down in a crisis suffer public opinion setbacks as they may appear weak and/or politically ineffective. Therefore, even if the EU only exerts pressure on a few issues, it may have the effect of weakening the <i>overall&nbsp;</i>clout of the current government. Conversely though, a political crisis with the EU may generate a kind of "rally 'round the flag" effect as conservative leaders pander to eurosceptic sentiment to gain support. Such an outcome would likely strengthen the conservative government's power and exacerbate tensions with other European states. Unfortunately, I am not enough of an expert on Hungarian domestic politics to get a sense of which effect would "win out" (nor am I familiar with any research comparing the two effects in general).<br /><br />Nevertheless, the controversy with the European Union could&nbsp;itself&nbsp;become valuable to Hungarian activists. By acting as a symbolic center of attention it may help to unite a diverse base of political actors around a single cross-cutting issue - the government's new constitution. Indeed, the logic behind Joshua Tucker's <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/2011121195922900200.html">argument</a> that electoral fraud in Russia may have been an important "focal point" for the recent protests may be somewhat applicable in the case of Hungary as well. A public censure by the EU could provide a central coordination mechanism around which citizens could mobilize and thereby serve as a means of solving the "collective action problem" facing any protest movement.<br /><br /><i>Edit: 12:43 AM 1/18</i>Anton Strezhnevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01981936254326619274noreply@blogger.com0